> In order to get shiny new trains and big public infrastructure projects like this, you need to pay a lot of tax

That's ideological bullshit that is directly at odds with reality. There's another perfectly good and effective way to get shiny new trains and infrastructure projects, and America is doing it with their freight railroads. It's called private investment, we've been doing a lot of it, very successfully, and railroads have been thriving. (The Economist, in a 2010 article which is linked nearby in this thread, opined that "America’s system of rail freight is the world’s best" and that "They are universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world.")

What America's railroads don't have is effective private passenger rail. Private investment won't deliver it because it doesn't make economic sense right now. Some of that is for geographical reasons (population density), some of that is regulatory risk (echoes of the regulatory hangover which helped drive the final nail in the coffin when railroads were already facing difficult competition from the growth of air travel and cars, including implicit highway subsidies) and fear of competing with quasi-governmental subsidized entities like Amtrak, some of that is actual market failure and what the economists call path dependency. Government investment in passenger rail in this nation (including high-speed rail) is something that could be meaningfully countenanced in this nation, though, obviously... if people thought they could trust the government to do make it worthwhile. (We'll see how efforts like the California high-speed-rail project will serve to convince people - boondoggle or good idea?)