"Through my lifetime I've only heard about tax cuts, I find this mysterious as presumably the taxes must have once risen to now be cut. Why have we seemingly lost the ability to say that we need new taxes?"

At the local level, we see pretty regular tax increases here in the midwest. There's a lot of resistance to increases in federal and state-wide taxes largely because federal and state spending is really hard to directly connect to a benefit to the payer (i.e. home value increases, better commutes, a fun local park). On the other hand, a ballot initiative to fund an improvement in roads or sewers is pretty easy to get through.