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The short answer is because you have to be able to sell tickets, and in most cities, selling out a stadium larger than about 65k is a real issue.Most NFL teams make their payroll and operating costs plus a small profit from the TV revenue shared with all of the other teams. Making additional profit (or covering a high-end-of-the-cap payroll) and having money to pay signing bonuses is covered by ticket sales and concessions/parking - that’s the cash on hand that teams need. To create that demand, they want as much exposure as possible to put butt in the seats, which means having their games on TV.NFL blackout rules state that the home team’s games have to be blacked out in the local market, IIRC, if the game isn’t a sellout 72 hours before kickoff. This may have changed in the last one or two TV contracts, but that was the rules for most of the NFL’s history with TV.Now, if you’re Pittsburgh, or Green Bay, or Dallas, where you have a 20 year waiting list for season tickets, it’s not an issue. You can probably build a stadium that seats 100k people (like Dallas did,) and still fill it in a down year. For a team like Jacksonville, which plays in a stadium that, I believe, seats 75k+ (for college football,) it’s an issue in many years. In fact, the Browns, when they played in old Municipal Stadium, which seated 80k, had games blacked out in WINNING seasons because they couldn’t meet the sellout requirements. That’s why Modell moved the team - he wanted a more modern stadium that was SMALLER. LA had the same issue with the Rams when they played in the Rose Bowl.65k seats seems to be the sweet spot, where you can fill the stadium most years and make good money on tickets and concessions. Any bigger than that is a liability that’s just not worth the operating and maintenance costs.

It’s actually easier than that. Every American making $128,400 or less pays exactly 6.2% of their income into Social Security. Every American making more than that, pays a smaller percentage. That’s because we’ve capped the Social Security tax at just under $8,000. If you make $150,000, you pay $7,960.80. If you make $200,000, you pay $7,960.80. If you make $3,000,000, you pay $7,960.80.Exact numbers are hard to find, but we collect about $875 billion a year for Social Security, with a surplus of around $45 billion. This surplus won’t last long as expenditures will soon surpass taxes collected. By my calculations, lifting the cap on payroll taxes would raise collections to almost $1 trillion per year, which would almost triple the current surplus. Doing this would affect no one making under $128,000 per year—or essentially $256,000 per year for a two-income family.

Your thesis is incorrect.While it’s true that the top 50% of income-earners in the United States pay basically all federal income tax, federal income tax is a bit less than 50% of federal revenue. More people pay more federal payroll tax (which is about 35% of federal revenue) than they do federal income tax, and in general the payroll tax actually falls slightly harder on lower income earners than on higher earners, because the payroll tax only taxes wages (other forms of income are not taxed at all) and is capped so that high wage earners ultimately pay a smaller percentage of their income on the payroll tax than do lower wage earners.And then there are state and local taxes. In much of the United States, these take the form of property taxes, which are paid by everyone who owns property, and sales taxes, which are paid by anyone who buys anything. If you have a car that you own (or lease) and have a license plate, you’re paying tax on that (and also paying gas tax on the gas you put in it). If you buy stuff in a state with a sales tax ( which is most of them), you’re paying taxes. And, while higher-income individuals often pay more per person than lower-income individuals on these taxes (because they own more expensive properties and buy more expensive things), they almost always pay a smaller portion of their income toward these taxes than do lower-income individuals.It’s simply not the case that all, or even close to all, of all taxes are paid by the top 20% earners. Whoever told you this was flat out lying to you.I also know that my family, which is not even close to the top 20% (although we are well over the 50% line) pays thousands of dollars in taxes every year.