Bear in mind, Lonn, that the government sees little (if anything) for municipal recycling collection. Often the companies that do the actual recycling offer money if you bring the stuff back yourself, but at five cents/container, blue boxes don't really show a quick ROI to the municipality.
While it conserves resources to recycle, it doesn't necessarily save anyone money. (Other than to generally improve productivity by making more resources available.) Plus, since you don't get 100% of the people recycling (even if it WERE free), the companies that might pay people for recycled materials still have to go out and get new materials, incurring all the expense you talked about earlier. They save a BIT, sure, by reducing the amount they need to get, but they don't save enough to pay the city what it costs to handle municipal recycling. You pay for garbage removal too, after all - you're not paying for the process, you're paying for the transport.
Now, as for the online billing - I'm not certain what it's like where you live, but up here in Vancouver you actually get a little bit taken OFF your bill if you elect to handle it online, since you've saved the company postage and paper.
Likewise, I don't know where you bank, but at TD or CIBC (my primary banks), going to see a teller costs money. ATMs are complimentary.
Finally, I can give a fairly comprehensive answer to the last one: because building a new nuke plant takes about a decade, and U-235 (along with pretty much every other metal) is suffering a minor crisis tied to the oil crisis because (naturally) it takes oil to mine for things. So every fuel you could possibly burn or fission to generate power has gone up in price. Ergo, fuel charge. Again, in BC, we generate
most of our electricity through hydroelectric installations, so we've been spared the fuel surcharge. I expect the new
wind projects will likewise be spared that surcharge.
I'd say it's high time the US started cranking up research into the
IFR rather than building more LWRs (with the full knowledge that the CANDU is, sadly, almost as inefficient), and started
letting the sunshine in - and then those pesky fuel surcharges would stop appearing on anyone's utility bill.
Happy Earth Day!