Surely there's got to be some kind of law surrounding the import price and the expected final retail price? In theory you could import a car, mark it as being valued at 1 cent, pay a 200 percent tariff of two whole cents and then sell at full price. The only danger would be that something happened in transit and the insurance company only pays 1 cent. Surely there's got to be something in place to stop this kind of loophole, seems way too exploitable.
You're taking it to the extreme whereas a 10% cost basis of a physical good sold to consumers isn't really that far off. If Dewalt claims one of their tools is worth "$200", yet it regularly sells for $100 still with enough margin for domestic distribution, "free shipping", no fault returns, branding/engineering cost of their domestic employees, etc, how much do you think they actually pay the Chinese factory? That's going to be the number written on a cargo manifest even without any shenanigans.
