You could reduce the tax rates to zero and it would have at most a marginal impact. The biggest driver by far is wages and benefits. The tax burden on companies is trivial by comparison. When you are talking $1/hour labor in China versus $15/hour labor in the US, it doesn't matter how much tax the US charges if the companies are competing directly. The rate could be zero and most of the business would still move to china if the labor content is high enough. Sure it would affect a few companies right on the fence but that doesn't apply to most of them.

The simple fact is that US labor rates are MUCH higher than in many other parts of the world and you should expect the osmotic gradient of high labor content jobs to flow to where labor costs are lowest. If labor rates in China rise substantially (and they have been) you will see the business move back across the Pacific or elsewhere. Anything the President of Congress does will be a very tiny impact by comparison.

That's because you don't live in the right place. There are LOTS of unskilled labor jobs available in parts of the world other than the US and EU. Go visit China for a while and tell me there are no jobs for low qualification workers. Go out to a farm and tell me there are no jobs for low qualification workers.

Yes a lot of jobs we currently have will disappear and others we cannot even conceive of yet will appear. It's easier to visualize the former since we know what those are. Could you have anticipated the job of Web Developer 50 years ago? Probably not - at least not without invoking science fiction. Same thing will happen 50 years from now most likely. We have a hard time guessing about things that haven't been invented yet.

I'm a certified accountant so I'm kind of giggling over you telling me "how accounting works".

I presume you are talking about Retained Earnings which is on the balance sheet. Retained Earnings != Earnings. Earnings = Profit and that comes from the Income Statement, not the balance sheet.

Investment is FAR more complicated than simply transferring items around a balance sheet and it touches the Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Statement of Cash Flows.

It depends on why you are investing the profits into those Treasury notes and whether you are investing in them as a profit making venture or merely as a place to park cash intended for other uses. The accounting is substantially different depending on the purpose of the investment. Furthermore the effect on earnings can be substantial in future accounting periods which I should think would be obvious.

The effect on profit depends on the return on the investment though in the immediate period the effect is either neutral or negative most likely. You're making the mistake of only considering the current accounting period. If you buy a building and capitalize the expense it has some effect on the current accounting period but the real effect on profit is depends on what you can do with that asset. It may reduce future profits or enhance them. Without more information no one can say more.

Then you are returning earnings to the shareholders rather than reinvesting them in the company or other assets. Basically a dividend is an admission by the company that the expected return from available investment opportunities is low. The company is foregoing future opportunities so the long term effect on earnings to the company is either neutral or negative.

Not correct and even if it were you aren't considering the net present value of that $100m.

Which is another way of saying they are investing in the business. Amazon is introducing products (tablets, phones, etc), investing in infrastructure (warehouses, IT) and similar. They have a long term perspective and aren't worrying about quarterly results. Perhaps this will burn them in the end but my thesis that they are investing in the business remains intact.

That isn't likely to change in the lifetime of anyone reading this. You actually even explained why below. To eliminate all need for human direct labor you would have to invent a machine that is as flexible as a human and costs less per unit. In other words a human level AI on the cheap. That simply isn't likely to happen anytime soon. (and don't give me any BS about the so called singularity or other paranoid hypothetical dystopian futures) Any scenario where we get human level AI in a robot body for less money than a human would cost is simply science fiction for the foreseeable future.

That is exactly why your hypothesis is wrong. The return on investment is simply too long for many projects to make certain types of automation economically feasible without the invention of robots with human level AI at absurdly cheap prices. To make automation practical you have to have large enough volume of product (measured in dollars) to achieve an economic return within the lifetime of the project. There are countless manufacturing projects where the lifetime and/or dollar value of the project is too short to justify complete automation and this will not change any time soon. The labor content of manufactured goods will minimize to a limit function but the need for human labor will not go to zero without invoking science fiction level advances in technology. If you need a model to look at check out agriculture. A lot of automation has gone into agribusiness but the equipment is VERY expensive (and not getting cheaper) and has not come even close to replacing the need for human labor and won't anytime soon either.

The notion that robots will replace all human workers in manufacturing is a paranoid delusion from people who aren't actually involved in manufacturing. I run a manufacturing company. I deal with this daily.

That's pretty much the same statement as saying nothing interesting or innovative has happened in IT in the last 40 years. Just because someone did a crude version of something 40 years ago doesn't mean there has been no advancement or innovation in the mean time.

Because they are reinvesting in the business and experimenting with new businesses. Unless you have a very short term Wall Street-esqe investment horizon that isn't really a big deal. Amazon could be substantially profitable tomorrow if they chose to be.

Automation does not and never did reduce the cost of direct labor to zero, nor does it reduce the cost of any product to the cost of raw materials even in a state of the art factory. First off there is always a substantial amount of direct labor in any company, even a highly automated one and the amount is non-trivial. Second there is the important matter of overhead (Sales, Engineering, Marketing, R&D, capital equipment, utilities, rent, property, maintenance, management, etc) which you seem to be completely overlooking. Automation can minimize labor costs but it cannot eliminate them because it is not economical to automate all jobs even when it is technologically possible to do so.

Disclosure: I'm an industrial engineer and a certified cost accountant. I do this sort of stuff for a living.

That's a very stupid question. Amazon has something around 110,000 employees. Amazon had revenues over the last twelve months of roughly $75 Billion. For 110,000 employees to spend $75,000,000,000 at Amazon they would have to spend $681,818 PER EMPLOYEE which I'm pretty sure is more than most Amazon employees make by more than just a wee bit. Any amount Amazon employees could possibly spend at Amazon would be a rounding error.

Righhhht. Everything is Obama's fault. [/eyeroll] Never mind the fact that the US has among the highest per-capita incomes in the world. If you want more labor-intensive (as opposed to capital-intensive) manufacturing and other jobs to come to the US the ONLY way that will happen is to reduce wages to be more competitive with the rest of the world. It has NOTHING to do with anything the Obama administration or Congress is doing and in fact there is NOTHING the President or Congress could do to change it. Simple economics 101 explains everything. High wages = high labor costs = increased automation.

If you want high wages you are necessarily going to make automation more attractive economically. You CANNOT have one without the other.

Check out the Ram 1500 Ecodiesel. 400ft/lbs of torque and gets almost 30mpg highway. Interior and suspension are nicer than the Ford too. Also GM is introducing a Colorado diesel in 2015 that might be worth a look.

That you don't understand that "playing nice" is a colloquialism indicates you completely missed the point.

Yep. We are forced to pay for lots of things by law. All those tanks and planes and medicare benefits and government salaries are required by law too and we all share the benefits of them whether we like it or not. And I'm ok with that. Medical care isn't free even if someone doesn't have insurance. If they don't pay then the rest of us do. Everyone uses medical care so everyone should have to have a little skin in the game.

Insurance rates have been going up by double digit percentages for years. Nothing new there. The ACA did not and could not possibly fix that. At best it may minimize the rate of increase. The reasons for insurance rates climbing have little to do with access to coverage.

Wrong. Millions have changed insurance coverage. HUGE difference. People now have access to coverage regardless of their employment situation. Losing access to health insurance because you lost a job is profoundly immoral. If someone chooses not to pay for coverage that is their right but since they are forcing that cost on others then they should be penalized.

Really? What threat? Nobody was threatened to pass the ACA. And it was passed by congress and (mostly) okay'd by the Supreme Court. What fraud? That Obama said (stupidly) that everyone could keep their coverage if they liked it? Way to miss the big picture dude.

Do you know how many rockets were unsuccessfully fired before we finally got one safely into space? Do you know how many airplanes were lost before we managed to make flight safe? How many boats were lost crossing the oceans?

Just because we haven't figured it out yet doesn't mean we won't. Only way to crack the problem is to try.

Depends on the type of cable and where it is being buried and how deep. Often yes but conduit is not always necessary. A lot of the cables are pretty robust on their own and the biggest utility in conduit is making it easier to service the cable later on. If you don't need to do that then it isn't always necessary. I'm more familiar with what they do with data cables and those frequently are not put in conduit.

The conduit they use for transmission usually comes on reels from what I've seen. They trench it into place then use some specialized wire feeding equipment to push the wire through once the conduit is in place. My father actually used to service and sell this sort of gear. They also don't always need to dig trenches. There is a lot of boring equipment not unlike stuff used for drilling that can be used so that you don't have to dig up everything between two points to lay the conduit. Some of this stuff is pretty cool to watch in action.

Wire curl isn't really the big limitation because the conduit is (usually) fairly smooth and it's not usually super hard to straighten the wire. The big problem is that you are essentially pushing a rope and the force you can use is limited by the durability of the cable jacket and the weight of the cable itself plus friction. 4AWG copper wire (think jumper cable thickness) for instance weighs 126lbs per 1000 feet. Add in frictional forces and you have to drive the cable with a force of a few hundred pounds to feed 1000ft of wire through a piece of conduit. Since the insulation material is relatively soft it's not hard to get to the point where you cannot feed more wire without damaging the cable due to the force required.

Sometimes they can do that but it depends on the circumstances. Remember that if they are replacing a cable there is probably a reason and the old one may no longer be intact. It also can be the case that they need additional wires. This sort of work is quite a bit more challenging than feeding wires through conduit in a building.

Mediocre mostly. That said it's unclear what Obama has to do with the profound incompetence of George W Bush. Obama has his own set of defects that are unique to him. GWB is without question the least competent president we've had since probably Herbert Hoover.

Nobody is going to make the Middle East stable particularly after Bush the Lesser started two wars over there that we are still dealing with over a decade later. And anyone who expected any president to voluntarily give up their expanded surveillance powers is a naive fool.

Kinda hard to do that when you are dealing with a megalomaniac like Putin. You go ahead and tell everyone how to play nice with Russia because nobody else seems to have a good idea.

Most people did. And now millions more have insurance that previously could not afford any. (including myself btw) But way to miss the big picture over rhetorical nitpicking. Yes there are significant problems with the law but the basics of what it accomplishes are a good thing.

I think calling the elder Bush the best President we've had in 40 years is more opinion than fact but he certainly was among the most qualified guys we've had in the job. Reagan gets the love from Republicans but I think Bush Sr. was a better president overall. Congressman, Ambassador to the UN, Envoy to China, Director of CIA, and Vice President. Unlike his son he was actually genuinely qualified for the job - at least as much as anyone can be. He was quite good at foreign policy which is about 2/3 of the job description for a president. Unfortunately he was not especially talented at domestic policy and even said publicly that he didn't enjoy it much. He did nothing to combat deficit spending and basically continued policies started under Reagan. When the economy tanked (not really his fault) near the election he was pretty much screwed regarding getting re-elected.

Ask George W Bush.

See previous answer.