Back to the argument of Amtrak...using this guy's whining logic, we should bust loose with a nationwide system of horse paths and bike paths. Dude, there's a reason why Amtrak cannot be self-sustaining, and it ain't because the government doesn't kick in enough cash...it's because nobody wants to ride a damned train. It takes you forever to get anywhere. Ergo, simply because it is a transportation alternative doesn't make it viable.
Let's build a coast-to-coast canal system while we're at it so all of the raft-riders can get around.
This may depend on how you compute the actual "return" for any given state, but my understanding is that Connecticut gets the least money from the U.S. government for every dollar it pays in taxes (something like $0.78), followed by New Jersey and New York.
The long-range trips that you describe are only part of the issue here. What makes the U.S. odd in terms of its transportation system is that nobody else in the world would even consider flying between two points as close together as New York and Washington, D.C. This is the kind of trip where even a regular train can compete with an airliner, and implementing high-speed service would extend the competitive range of that "short" trip even further (say, New York to Cleveland).
If a train could get you from Chicago to Detroit in 2 hours, would you take it?.
---max