I think people need to seperate out two different things that happen at the start of the season.
As Joseph started this thread, salary changes are on the order of 5-10% depending on what salary range you are looking at.
Second, all the players in the game got better.. as they do every season, sometimes massively better and so everyone's payrolls shoot up by large amounts at the start of the season... that's why you are seeing these 50% increases people are discussing. I think people are blaming the salary increase for what really is the effect of training.
Its true, if you do not promote and your players get better, you might have to sell some of them in order to keep your teams payroll in an affordable range for your division.
The game is designed so that everyone in the same division is on a roughly equal playing field, and can try to be strategic about training and recruiting prominent players, and putting together a talented but affordable roster, in hopes of promoting to a new division, where you will have more resources to buy better players and will soon be able to compete on that new, but hopefully also level playing field.
Another thing to keep in mind, is that salaries are not going to continue to go up indefinitely, what we have said is that we want to keep the upper level salary costs about the same... we thought that they would be going up faster than they actually did at first, and that's the reason for this current bump, but going forward we anticipate balancing the increase in skill a the top end with a decrease in the salary formula so that the top end players continue to cost what they cost right now, even as they get better.
So if someone wants to make the argument that the top level teams cannot afford the current salaries they can try.. but i know the numbers and top division teams were making a lot of money last season, and this salary increase put a dent in their profit.. but didn't make it impossible to run a team.
All those that were clamoring about inflation should also be satisfied, and lower transfer prices will mean less profit to be made with day trading, and will put focus away from the economic factors.
When you zoom out and look at the changes we have made over the last 2-3 seasons, I think you can see that we have been trying to make inter division competition more even, tried to avoid having players that are not affordable to have on your team, and have tried to make these changes as slowly as we could possibly imagine in order to lessen the impact... of course, changes have transitory impacts. An auto-adjusting economy doesn't mean that there will never be adjustments, we just hope that we settle into a nice equilibrium. Clearly we aren't there yet...