"Fun" aside: Did you know that if you cause a mass-casualty event the US, GDP goes up? Those healthcare costs aren't going to pay for themselves, sis! Stephen Paddock generated more revenue for hospitals in Clark County than you or I ever will in our lives.
America is still in denial about being a smaller economy than China even though it has been for years. They'll probably add a few more trillion in financial smoke and mirrors to keep up the illusion.
Yeah but all of China's GDP is useless crap like high speed trains and manufacturing. They've already fallen hopelessly behind in key areas of GDP like consultant and lawyer fees, rent people who own their houses would have paid (real thing, look up "imputed rent") and selling jpgs of apes to each other.
Purchasing Power Parity is a fake metric because it doesn't take into account important economic activities such as advertisement, addiction optimization, financial products with impossible-to-detangle risk profiles, and monetized political outrage. If you properly account for that, you will see that US economic output far exceeds China's fake economy!
That was probably projected when relations between the USSR and the west were better. The difference here is that projection is more or less set in stone unless the west wants to commit suicide economically. Remember the west needs China more than China needs the west.
The growth rates are a strange entity to begin with. Mainstream Chinese economists expect that China's growth will slow down eventually as their overall GDP rises, analogous to other high-GDP countries. This usually goes hand-in-hand with stressing the need for a transition to more domestic markets and balanced production (i.e. less focused on export and building productive forces at the expense of domestic workers).
At the same time, since GDP just measures "the sum of all the crap sold" and because the commanding heights of China's economy are controlled by the CPC, it is possible for it to have a somewhat different trajectory than the other high-GDP countries, as all of those other countries are also the imperialist order, they structure their economies around extraction from the global south (a small number have been propped up by empire as bases for attack, e.g. occupied Korea).
Basically... China will be in somewhat new territory in its attempt to build a high-GDP economy with a balanced productive sector not dependent on massively unequal exchange. As others (maybe you?) correctly note, the USSR was on this trajectory, albeit at breakneck speed and with less overall productive development than China - and without the interdependence that Dengist strategies created.
The basic question will be whether China can keep making more and larger amounts of things and services that are sold somewhere. Part of this will be what prices they can charge, and whether they can be higher prices than now, and this will depend on domestic consumption and pay as well as the dynamics of exports, especially whether other countries can similarly develop productive forces or if they'll just go the more likely direction of being neocolonies that make simpler products and with less concentrated industry.
Personally... I have no idea. I just think it's new territory.
Great news, truly the death of capitalism and neoliberalism in particular is imminent, I dont know what will happen to me or others stuck in the belly of this dying monster but at least I can be glad that it is in fact, dying.
With the assumption the article makes that China is already at 138% of America's GDP, and they were at parity only a few years ago, it isn't a stretch to believe that by 2035 they will be at 200%; they're already 38% of the way there.
A lot of the U.S.'s claimed GDP is, like others have said, fiscal smoke and mirrors. Stuff like including landowners "virtual rent" they pay to themselves for the use of their own real estate.
The way it's calculated now, GDP is kind of nonsense. Let's imagine a hypothetical duo of countries whose entire economy is oranges. In one, $1b of oranges are harvested, brought to farmers markets, and sold. In the other, $1b of oranges are harvested by one company, bought by a factory who peels them and sticks them in plastic cups, and then bought by a store that sells them to the ultimate consumer. Despite both getting $1b of oranges into peoples' stomaches, the first country has a GDP of $1b, while the second has a GDP of $3b (or more, since these entities are likely upcharging along the way).
Since the USA's military-industrial-complex primarily functions as political patronage, and is only secondarily about maintaining empire, is it possible that the actual purchasing power of the Chinese military budget is fairly close to what the USA is getting out of their budget? Especially since China's military has a more limited mission, and so doesn't need the same level of capabilities for power projection that the USA does.
Since the USA's military-industrial-complex primarily functions as political patronage, and is only secondarily about maintaining empire, is it possible that the actual purchasing power of the Chinese military budget is fairly close to what the USA is getting out of their budget?
As well as the sheer speed with which Beijing is able to acquire new weapons, Holt contends, the Chinese are also operating far more efficiently. “In purchasing power parity, they spend about one dollar to our 20 dollars to get to the same capability,” he told his audience. “We are going to lose if we can’t figure out how to drop the cost and increase the speed in our defense supply chains,” Holt added.
“We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years,” Chaillan told the FT. “Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion.”
Words of Cameron G. Holt, major general, in charge of all aspects of contracting.
I would imagine that the actual purchasing power of Chinese military far surpasses the US. Even Russia is able to outproduce the US militarily, and China is in a whole different league in terms of industrial power.
Can the world stop competing with GDP? It’s nonsense and leads to overproduction, overconsumption, and waste. It’s a “who can ruin the planet faster” competition.
If the entire world’s GDP needs to fall so that we can reduce population growth, emissions, and hunger, so be it.