My guess would be Boeing is fleeing exceedingly high corporate tax rates, along with unions and unnecessary regulation on how they conduct business, like Sarbanes-Oxley. Boeing, and other companies like them, compete globally. It's tough enough to bring in customers, no matter how good your product is, when you have to pass along the second highest corporate tax rate in the world to those customers. Imagine having to deal with our corporate tax rate, the unions, and the cost of excessive gubmint regulation, all while trying to compete against gubmint subsidized Airbust. It's a recipe for disaster for American workers and it's 100% self inflicted by our own gubmint....almost like they want business to fail or move overseas, huh?
In a word: U-N-I-O-N-S
If the Dems succeed in increasing unionization in the U.S. it will cause havoc for most companies who rely on parts and raw materials from a variety of small, specialty suppliers.
You can’t plan production if you’re coping with one or more suppliers being on strike at any given time, thus interrupting your flow of raw materials/parts, not to mention the impossibility of predicting costs over any extended period of time (higher wages = higher parts costs).
The number of individual parts in a 747 is staggering. My Dad (now deceased) retired from being a purchaser of A/C parts for Boeing and handled the challenge of A/C parts long before computers kept track of all the items required.
So your guess is that Boeing is fleeing exceedingly high corporate tax rates. Are your guesses always so completely uninformed? Between 2005 and 2008 Boeing paid an average corporate tax rate of 3.2%. See: http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/corporate_taxes_2009/who_pays_the_least.asp. Not exactly a backbreaking tax burden, or one that would drive a company overseas. McNerney is making a grave mistake if he thinks China will be satisfied just being a subcontractor. Intel keeps its leading design in house - they would never outsource that, especially in China, who they know want to be a powerhouse in semiconductors.