> The only thing stopping companies from investing in the US right now is lack of demand / lack of disposable income
That's clearly not a problem. The US has one of the highest median household disposable income levels, thanks in part to low (compared to most of the developed world) middle class income taxes. It's over 50% higher than Sweden, Finland, Japan and Britain. It's also about 25% higher than Norway. And those figures are calculated before the dollar hit its recent highs in 2015. Americans have no lack of disposable income.
Unfortunately US is consistently ranked something like 32 or 33 out of 36 for inequality across population for countries in the OECD index. Basically Mexico, Chile, and Brazil are outliers by an order of magnitude and US trades spots among Turkey and Russia year to year, then every other country does better. It's also notable that of your examples all are better with Norway, Sweden, and Finland particularly good. Furthermore the OECD household net-adjusted disposable income does not subtract expenditures it probably should, for example not all of the medical costs. I have been averaging $13000 for one child alone over the last two years in expenditures that the formula does not consider. The year before that there was even more for my wife. In a household of five it adds up and there seems to be one outlier needing more medical care than the rest.
If so, I wasn't able to find median info on disposable income there for the US, which I think is a very important distinction from average. If not, can you please share another source since I'm very curious to see how it shakes out across the developed world.
Also, I think it's also important to note that my original post was perhaps incomplete referring to disposable income generally. What's more important is growth in disposable income year over year, and related, growth in actual expenditures. For the US, OECD puts disposable income growth at just 0.8% year over year in the US since 2008. A population might have tons of disposable income, but if all of it is already being spent, then that doesn't help companies very much with demand - zero growth equals a zero sum game. Compare the US growth rate with that of China, which is 10x more [1] and also where many big companies have focused their investments in recent years.
That's clearly not a problem. The US has one of the highest median household disposable income levels, thanks in part to low (compared to most of the developed world) middle class income taxes. It's over 50% higher than Sweden, Finland, Japan and Britain. It's also about 25% higher than Norway. And those figures are calculated before the dollar hit its recent highs in 2015. Americans have no lack of disposable income.