Taxes have nothing to do with the trend.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/as-do...ncial-bounty-goes-to-investors-161616134.html
Over the past five years, total profits of the current Dow 30 members surged by more than 42% through the end of 2014, to nearly $320 billion. This has driven the average annual profit per employee up by more than 34% since 2009, to $48,887. It hardly bears repeating that wages across the U.S. economy have barely grown at all in recent years beyond the general rate of inflation.
Most of the financial bounty from this corporate renaissance has gone to investors (and the top corporate executives who reap rewards from higher share prices).
There are a variety of forces pushing this trend, many of them underway for decades.
Two generations of corporate executives have been steeped in the productivity ethic, a constant imperative to do more with less, to substitute automation technology for human workers and to defend profit margins zealously even in flush times. Globalization brought new competitors and low-cost labor in other world regions.
One could defend these companies by noting that if they’ve managed record profits while keeping payrolls lean, it says they didn’t need to hire any more people after all.