Aren’t Americans too “spendy” to have that happen here? The main driver of the stagflation in Japan is that they’re too thrifty - their stimulus are literally expiring credit cards, forcing people to spend money.
It's important to think about the "spendy" / "thrifty" thing as being partly-- maybe mostly-- demographics. Young people are spendy, borrowing against future earnings, old people are thrifty, counting on assets to support them.
Japan is in demographic decline. The US keeps growing demographically, but it does because of immigration. If the US has less immigration the chances improve that it will stagnate economically like Japan.
I don't know if any of the things I am describing are good or bad. But a lot of our assumptions about how the US economy "always" is are based on 300 years of population growth.
The US still has MASSIVE amounts of un-developed land that our population can grow into and utilize in all sorts of ways. Have you ever driven across the midwest? Soooooo much land just being wasted...
