Your math is way off. Ridiculous.
Labor for the average manufactured good in the USA is 8% of retail price. Take cars, union labor the most expensive kind, is 8% of the cars retail price. If you made the cars in Bangladesh they would be 8% cheaper. Your example of a 10X cost increase is border line psychotic.
Labor is a small part of the cost of a manufactured good.
Labor is a small part of the cost of a manufactured good. ........................... Really? Labor starts with the farmer, digger, engineer, artist, etc etc etc required to produce anything. A car engine has to be designed, metal is needed, to be melted into forms which had to be produced to produce parts, that needed to be finished, and drilled and welded etc.etc.blah blah blah, and that was only 8% ?? FANTASTIC!
All the materials that go into a car have a starting point, and it starts with a laborer and ends up being driven out by a laborer. Looks like a lot of labor to me. What do I know, I’m just some old guy who bought a new car for $1500 when I graduated from college. I had a 10 yr old Pontiac before that which cost me $115. I worked in a men’s shop when I was in college. I was even a Union member. So what. When I say the labor costs killed us, its based on the wages that went from 1.00 an hour to what the average pay today is, i.e. my garage mechanic gets $75 an hour, not $5-10 like back in 1957, I earned $100 a week as a school teacher, today they start at about 45K. We are the ones responsible for the cost of living that keeps rising, and what do we do, we keep it going and wonder why some billion plus other people are willing to work for far less, doing the same jobs. Had any problems with your i phones lately? Need technical help, no problem its there, but can you understand what they are saying? Also where is it made? My phone is $840, but there are clones out there for far less, and they are made in the same foreign country. Go figure. Can’t we make them here for the same lower price like the clones? I’m going off on a tangent, but I think most understand what I trying to say about the rising cost of living, that virtually keeps us off the playing field.