"Bud, if China can light half the fire under it's citizen that we did under ours, it will have 2.5 times the tax revenues."
If China can do that, it will be after most any of us on this board right now are dead. Most projections for China still hold: By the time she exhausts her developing-economy growth rates she will likely be no larger than the U.S., might be somewhat larger, and may well be a good deal smaller.
The most optimistic projections of Chinese growth (which blow away most other projections) is a Goldman Sachs paper ("Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050"), which pegs average Chinese GDP growth in the 5% range already by 2010-2015, and in the 4% range 2020-2030. By the 2040 she'll be growing no faster than the United States is capable of growing - she'll be a long-developed economy. Exchange rates at that point would be the difference; she simply cannot just "outgrow" us. And even at that point you're looking at a $31,000 per-capita income in China versus an $84,000 per-capita income in the United States. (With China's population being little larger at that point than it is today, and America's potentially, or likely, numbering between 400 and 500 million up from 300 million today.)
If we were starting with half the economy we actually have, yes, we'd be also-rans. That's not the reality.
Those are interesting projections. That's a pretty dismal trickle down theory. We shall see.