It's an easy cop-out to blame one party. BOTH parties do nothing and then blame the other--and the media has clearly taken sides (make that one side). The U.S. will NEVER construct a system like Europe, mainly because things are too spread-out. The biggest roadblock though will be the routings. There is ZERO chance that the current rail system could be built today, and probably only a 50% chance that the highway system could too given the environmental bureaucracy and the fact that "it" will have to be built in areas where stuff has already been built. A HSRN would probably be forced to circumnavigate every wetland, "endangered" species habitat, or NIMBY neighborhood over each mile. Every half-wit politician would be against the plan if it didn't guarantee his or her re-election. And, yes, everybody is going to want everybody else to pay for it. In my town, whenever some councilperson wants something built or fixed, they propose raising the 'room tax' so "...the tourists will pay for it". Sounds great except that the average doofus voter forgets to realize that whenever they go on vacation to some other town, they are the sap who is paying for that local infrastructure. (I just got back from a place that charged a 35% tax on rental cars.) Just getting the California plan to where it is today (without one stick of rail laid) has taken a criminally-high amount of money for studies, re-studies, and turf wars--and has resulted in compromise-based starting and ending points that don't make sense to anybody. The U.S. is an air-based transportation system. It seems like every year our local airport is doing some big-scale upgrade--with a nearby sign that displays how it is funded by FAA dollars.