High Speed Rail in the USA

[Starter]

The US chose to spend it's infrastructure bills for 50 years on road rather than rail. I seriously doubt whether Amtrak which runs over existing commercial railway lines, has anywhere even near one tenth the ability to raise that sort of capital required to build a DB equivalent system; as such, there'll never be an ICE in the US.

Correct. I think your suggested price to do it is also quite low. Land (right of way) acquisition costs could easily run that much and more. A taking of private property on that scale would also cause a wholesale change in Congress for anyone who supported it. I think your construction costs are low too. Perhaps if the country was flat, but you would have three mountain ranges to cross - the Appalachians (easy, they're low) and the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas (not so low).