The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration is considering ratcheting up the tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese imports from the proposed 10 percent levy to as much as 25 percent. Hiking the tariff, Trump’s advisers seem to think, will force Beijing to back down and offer major concessions. Whether or not those tariffs move forward remains to be seen, and the administration reportedly won’t make a decision until later this month. The tariffs are justified, the Trump administration says, because the Chinese yuan continues to depreciate, undercutting U.S. competitiveness. “Once you go down the road of using tariffs to disrupt the Chinese, you have to say 25% compared to 10%,” Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute and adviser to the administration on trade, told the WSJ. The problem with that logic is that the tariffs are part of the reason why China’s […]