UTF-8 is becoming more and more common virtually everywhere (W3Techs in June 2015 puts UTF-8 at 84.3% on the web), has no storage penalty over US-ASCII for the US-ASCII range (U+0000 through U+007F) (depending on the implementation the BOM may carry a three-byte penalty, but a BOM is only needed if the encoding and/or byte order is not otherwise known, which it would be in this case), and it can represent the full range of Unicode so it will future-proof your application character-set-wise at no extra cost if you don't use that capability. In summary, I see no reason not to use UTF-8 encoding these days, particularly if your choices are between UTF-8 and US-ASCII. And even in a US-only world, I would be very wary of saying that there will be "no need" to encode any letters outside of the English alphabet.
I'm pretty sure I saw a RFC from a few years back that stated that UTF-8 is the new Internet standard character set (replacing US-ASCII), but then I couldn't find it again. However, BCP 18 (RFC 2277) section 3.1, What charset to use, comes close in stating that, in part:
All protocols MUST identify, for all character data, which charset is
in use.
Protocols MUST be able to use the UTF-8 charset, which consists of
the ISO 10646 coded character set combined with the UTF-8 character
encoding scheme, as defined in [10646] Annex R (published in
Amendment 2), for all text.
Protocols MAY specify, in addition, how to use other charsets or
other character encoding schemes for ISO 10646, such as UTF-16, but
lack of an ability to use UTF-8 is a violation of this policy; such a
violation would need a variance procedure ([BCP9] section 9) with
clear and solid justification in the protocol specification document
before being entered into or advanced upon the standards track.