In preparing for their annual reverse New Year's Eve party at the Omaha Bugle in which the consumption of champagne begins three days before the ball drops in Times Square and ends exactly at midnight on New Year's Eve with a traditional stomach pumping at the local hospital, Adam and Jeff consider the boasts of the Chinese Communist Party that it will soon bury the United States based upon China's long-term double-digit economic growth rate. They point out that China, which has enjoyed an average 10 percent annual growth rate in GDP for more than three decades, has stumbled in recent years with its published growth rate barely above 2 to 3 percent per year. Leaving aside whether these government statistics are even accurate, Jeff criticizes the so-called "declinists" who have almost gleefully projected that China's GDP would continue to grow at double digit-rates for the foreseeable future, thus setting it up to displace the United States as (to use the language embedded in today's political science scholarly literature) the "numero uno bandito" in the global economic system. He characterizes the analysis of the declinists--who are among the most dour people you could ever meet--as being inadequate at best because their projections are nothng more than straight-lines extending outward for decades. Unfortunately, the declinists (who would make misery expert Robert Malthus, by comparison, appear as enthusiastic as a cruise ship activities director) fail to take into account the fact that the Chinese population is projected to drop by at least half and perhaps as much as two-thirds by the end of the century--thus cutting severely both the number of workers available to produce all of this stuff and the number of consumers able to buy all of this stuff. In short, these projections are delusional fantasies and China's economy will likely contract severely over the next several decades because there will not be enough people around to buy all the goods that it would need to make in order to overtake the economy of the United States.