Regan Benson was furious about the list of fees her local public high school was charging for kids to "just walk in the front door." She was even angrier about where the money was going.

"It's crazy — $18 for a basic English class; $38 for honors English; $150 for each sport; a $60 graduation fee," she said, holding a paper she called the "fee sheet" from her school district. It had nearly 100 items on it and looked every bit like a small-print contract you might get from a credit card company. "I wouldn't mind if I knew the fees were going for what it says here, but I don't believe that."

Benson said she wasn't quite sure how to find out where the money was going and, more important, how to make a stink about it.

Enter "MAD" moms. 

Benson recently found her way to Amy Oliver, founder of a Golden, Colo.-based group called MAD, or "Mothers Against Debt." Its stated mission is to get moms worried about the government debt their children will inherit and encourage them to ask questions against government spending in their communities.

"When you talk about a number with 12 zeroes in it, people can't relate," says Oliver. "But when you talk about a bill you're handing to your kids, moms get worried about that. ... No responsible mother would ever let someone rack up a $45,000 bill and hand it to their kids, but that's exactly what we're letting the federal government do to them."

Oliver is a popular conservative morning radio talk show host in the Denver area and works at a Golden-based libertarian think tank, the Independence Institute. MAD was her idea, and it's funded by the libertarian group.

"We're trying to change the paradigm about government debt," she said. "We see this as a child welfare issue, and that's the way to get moms interested in it. I call this fiscal child abuse."

Women often view money different from men, she said. A working mother views higher taxes or lower wages chiefly as a loss of family time — they mean the woman has to work longer hours, leading to more time away from her children.

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Amy Oliver, founder of Mothers Against Debt, says the organization is trying to help moms become more active in government.

"This is how you get moms interested in fiscal issues," she said. "We are getting women active because we help it mean something to them."

She compared the exploding federal debt to widespread pollution in the 1950s and 1960s, which was often ignored until environmental reform efforts saw their efforts galvanized by publication of an explosive book called "Silent Spring," which predicted the eradication of bird species due to chemical industry malpractice.

"Back then, people became worried about what kind of world they would leave their children. Well, that's how we feel now. We think this is our 'Silent Spring' moment, only the problem isn't birds, it's dead economic activity," she said. "If we don't get debt under control, our children won't have an economy. There will be no growth. There will be high unemployment. We will keep falling behind."

Fiscal issues have often been trapped in male-dominated conversations, Oliver thinks, and she's trying to bring the conversation "to the kitchen table."

One way to do that is to inspire moms to get more involved in local school spending. While school board budgets and federal spending involve two different pots of money, the core issue is the same, said Oliver. ("K-12 education is where their heart lies," she said.) So MAD has a project called "Citizen Auditors," in which concerned community members learn how to read city budgets and file Freedom of Information requests.

Benson used training from MAD to find out about a $3,000 cell phone bill in her district. She also found out that her school district collects $676,000 in parking permit fees annually.

"The real question is: What are we getting for all this money we're spending?" Benson said. "People are starting to push back."

Moms who question schools boards often find they are met with "intellectual bullies," Oliver said, who scoff at supposedly naive questions posed during school board meetings.

"Well, we see them as obnoxious teenagers who just want to keep reaching into your pocket for money and don't think you have a right to ask what it's for," she said.

Oliver's group, founded in 2009, enjoyed a whiff of national attention last year when Fox News aired a satiric video made by MAD called "Baby Ball and Chain," showing an animated baby shackled by ever-growing government debt. The brief appearance helped the group collect several thousand Facebook fans. Oliver gets requests from moms all around the country now, she said.

"Just the other day I got an e-mail from woman in Maine asking, 'How do I find this stuff out about my school district?'" she said.

To be sure, Oliver's group looks and sounds a lot like the Tea Party. But she says ballooning debt and a mother's concern for her kids' future are non-partisan issues.

"For years, people have been saying the money is for the kids. The spending is for the kids. It's not. That's a lie, and it's a lie moms have bought for years," she said. "The spending is for the people in the system, not for the kids. … We spend more per capita on schools that any other country, and what results do we get?"

Of course, it's one thing to talk about excessive government spending; it's another to actually cut spending. Many of Oliver's acolytes encounter the same frustrating Catch-22 that's been bogging down efforts to shrink spending for years — sure, there's infuriating waste, like excessive cell phone charges, but eliminating those discretionary items rarely amounts to much. At every level of government, the real costs are fixed, through long-term teacher contracts, long-term Social Security promises and so on. These are structural problems that can't be fixed overnight.

"That's why it's important to become involved, to get people interested. And I'm going to say it, to get mom's interested, because men handle money differently than moms do," Oliver said. "That's why we need them in the process."

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You're blissfully hurtling down a desolate stretch of interstate at 70 mph, singing along with your iPod. The scenery is spectacular, the sun is shining, and things couldn't be better. Then you round a bend and suddenly the sky turns midnight black. There's lightning and a thunderclap that feels like it comes from your back seat.  There's a trickle of rain, followed seconds later by a downpour, then hail. The highway isn't desolate any more, as you've caught up to all other drivers who are crawling along at 10 mph because they can barely see 50 feet. What do you do?

Many U.S. adults do exactly the wrong thing, contradicting the advice given by the National Weather Service and potentially putting themselves and their families in serious danger.

The American road trip is as much a part of our nation's fabric as apple pie and baseball. Nothing restores the soul like remembering how big and beautiful this land is. It's important to remember that road trips are more journey than vacation, however. Things can and do go wrong.  Bad weather is at the top of that list.  You simply can't drive coast to coast without hitting a few bad storms. 

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

A rainbow graces Detroit's skyline on Wednesday.

I love summer rain during a road trip.  It smells incredible, and it can lower oppressive outside temperatures drastically.  There's often a rainbow to enjoy when the storm is over.  And the best part: If you don't like the weather, keep driving. No doubt, things are different when you clear the next mountain range, or when you out-drive the storm.

I'm talking about tame rain, however. Plenty of east and west coasters might not be familiar with the more intense storms that regularly pelt the middle of the country, like Arizona's afternoon monsoons. And there's no denying that driving through a tornado warning is harrowing experience.  So here's some basic road trip advice on handling extreme weather.

Most drivers will only have to deal with some heavy rain during a typical trip, and the advice there is standard: move over, slow down, don't have bald tires and leave plenty of extra following distance. Each day this week, I've driven through at least two bad downpours, but neither one lasted more than 30 minutes. That's pretty typical.

Dealing with more extreme weather is really an information problem: Should I leave the hotel now or wait two hours until the storm has passed?  That story is mixed now: On one hand, there are all manner of Internet enabled gadgets to help us predict the weather. On the other hand, it's harder to hear emergency warnings about extreme weather because many iPod-loving drivers don't listen to their radios any more. That's why, if you're driving and there's any sign of ominous clouds, it's best to turn off your tunes, find a local station and listen for weather alerts.

Of course, radio station consolidation and the proliferation of national networks like ESPN Radio has made finding local stations harder in the middle of the country. Those stations will still play emergency messages, but you won't get earlier warnings from local DJs who know the weather better. That’s why it's still worth spinning around the dial -- sampling local radio is one of the treats of cross-country trips, anyway.

It's not always clear what to do with emergency warnings, however.  Recently I was caught in a very violent thunderstorm storm cell, with cloud-to-ground lightning all around me, and the emergency broadcast system warning me to “stay inside.”  Adding to my dilemma, I was stuck in traffic on a highway and had nowhere to go. What would you do?

You're still much more likely to be in a car accident than to be hit by lightning, even in this situation, so handling the car safely is your first concern.  If you can pull off the road safely and wait out the worst of the rain, that's probably a good idea.  Flooding is likely your second-biggest worry, so don't park in a depressed area, such as under an overpass. 

What about that lightning? You've probably heard at some point that the rubber tires on your car can save you from electrocution by a direct lightning strike because they act as a ground.  That's not true.  The car itself however can act as what's called a "Faraday Cage," dispersing the electric charge around the metal shell of the car. 

That's great, unless you happen to be touching metal in the car when the strike hits, such as a steering wheel or stick shift.  There are reports of police officers getting bad mouth burns because their squad car was struck while they were talking on their radios.

So what's the best advice for sitting out a lightning storm in your car? Stay in the vehicle, turn the ignition off and keep your hands in your lap, says the National Lightning Safety Institute. Don't lean on the car door, and never step out of the car.

Far less likely -- but certainly possible -- is an encounter with a tornado. Again, your best defense is information: Listen to local radio for specific areas that are under tornado watches or warnings. 

Because tornados can pack an almost unimagineably violent force -- they can lift and throw entire buildings -- there are no sure-fire safety tips for dealing with them. There also is a difference of opinion about the best course of action if you encounter a tornado  while driving. 

All agree that abandoning the car to enter a strong shelter is your best bet. On the open road, however, that might not be possible.  Professional storm chasers do outrun tornados in their vehicles -- their trick is to drive away from the storm at a right angle, to the south if possible (the north side of the storm will be pelted with hail.)  An emergency memory trick for this maneuver is to directly face the storm, and then turn 90 degrees to the right.

Tornados can travel 60 mph or faster, however, and everyday drivers may put themselves at greater danger by attempting to outrun a storm. The controversy surrounds the two bad options that remain: staying in the car with the seat belt on and bend below the windshield, or abandoning the car and laying down in a ditch. 

Both ideas have merit. The car will provide protection from objects thrown violently by the storm. Even if the car is thrown by the twister, it will provide some impact protection. On the other hand, a driver who finds a deep ditch well below ground level should be safer from violent winds as the storm passes. Ideally, it should be far from the abandoned car, which could be hazardous if it's thrown. Also, beware of possible flash flooding in the ditch. 

The National Weather Service and the American Red Cross recently advised drivers that each option has its benefits, and drivers in a crisis should consider both:

"If flying debris occurs while you are driving, pull over and park. Now you have the following options as a last resort," they said in a joint statement.(PDF) "Stay in the car with the seat belt on. Put your head down below the windows, covering with your hands and a blanket if possible. If you can safely get noticeably lower than the level of the roadway, exit your car and lie in that area, covering your head with your hands."

For more tips on driving in tornados, click here and here.

Whatever the weather, staying calm is the key to making good choices, and information can really help. I'm a big fan of the Weather.com iPhone (or Android) app, which gives you hour-by-hour weather predictions and -- more important -- up-to-the-minute radar maps showing precipitation amounts.  They make it easy to see if the storm you're in is a five-minute interruption by Mother Nature or a two-hour beast that you'd be better riding out in a hotel room. I find it indispensible. 

Most of all, don't rush: build in extra time for your trip. That way, you'll have the option to make the safer, more conservative choice if you need to, without worrying about missing grandma's turkey dinner.

What are your tips for bad-weather road trip driving?

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Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Esther Shapiro, with part of her beloved Shakespeare collection in the background. Ask her about consumer protection and she is likely to respond with some blank verse.

IN A BEAUTIFUL GARDEN, DETROIT -- To call Esther Shapiro the Ralph Nader of Michigan is to compliment Ralph Nader. 

The arc of her life runs perfectly parallel to the birth, life, and near death of America's consumer movement -- in fact, you might call her its grandmother.  Now 93, Shapiro still lists herself as a "consumer consultant" in the phone book. But she frets about the state of the economy, the fate of her beloved Detroit, but most of all, about the lack of effective consumer protections across America.

From 1974 to1988 she ran Detroit's forward thinking Office of Consumer Protection, perhaps the most active agency of its type in the country. She had real power; she could revoke a firm's business license if it misbehaved, she could bar it from advertising in Detroit newspapers. She had a regular radio segment and newspaper column. She filed lawsuits, got refunds for jilted consumers, and -- with the help of her police commissioner husband -- put bad guys in jail. By the time she was forced to retire at age 80, she had vast files on every possible consumer scam -- and a heart full of stories from grateful consumers who she'd helped.

Early in her career, she helped stop a widespread scam run by criminals who took deposits from people desperate for leads on cheap apartments, then never furnished the leads. She was able to get refunds for some victims, and told me about one woman who showed up to collect her money.

"She just kind of grabbed it, like you would grab food if you were hungry. Then she said to me, 'Do you know what it's like to be a welfare mother and be cheated out of your last dollar?’ And walked away. That really stuck with me," Shapiro said.

Stories like those fueled her long hours, her endless lectures to community groups, and they still fuel her when frustrated consumers track her down through the phone book.

They call because no one really does her kind of work anyone. After Shapiro left, the consumer agency died a slow death. Her files were thrown away, she said, her eyes tearing up.

"For a while if you called the number, there was just a message that said this inbox is full," Shapiro said. "There's no place for people to call now."

Shapiro has called Detroit home for more than 50 years, and has lived just a few blocks outside the hardscrabble downtown area for the past 40.  A Chicago native, she met her husband in New York and lived in Vancouver, Wash., during World War II, but fell in love with the motor city after her husband landed a job there as a union organizer in the 1950s. She has raised a family tree of do-gooders -- a grand-daughter in Seattle who fights for immigrant construction workers' rights, a daughter who's active in the Women in Black peace movement.  In fact, her secret shame in the Shapiro family is that "I'm the only one who's never been arrested. They tease me about it all the time."

Talking with Shapiro, you get the idea that she still has plenty of time for that. I met her via email five years ago when writing about the death of price tags on consumer products – she’s still the nation’s most persuasive apologist for price tags and product labeling as a source of consumer protection, and I have interviewed her several times since.  But we hadn’t met face to face until I made the pilgrimage to Detroit on Wednesday.

She's a bit unsteady on her feet these days, but still manages to scramble out to her perfect, tiny garden on request and has no trouble reciting entire scenes from Shakespeare plays during a pesky reporter's camera sound check. 

But she turns gravely serious when talking about the people she used to help.

"I'm very worried about the future," she said. "In essence there is no consumer protection today. There are still laws on the books, but the enforcement isn't there. Nobody has the lawyers to do it themselves, the local organizations that are supposed to enforce don't do it. ... There are things on the books that would solve a lot of these consumer problems. But there is no one to enforce them or teach them."

America's consumer protection movement reached its heyday in the early 1970s, when Ralph Nader was one of America's most recognized figures.  Almost all real help is local, however -- anyone who's every complained to a federal banking regulator can attest to that -- so various states and cities created their own activist consumer agencies at the time. Detroit's agency, and Shapiro, were a model for the country. That's why the destruction of her files -- and the shuttering of her agency -- hurts so much.

"I thought that was going to be my legacy," she said. 

But even though her movement has run out of steam for now, Shapiro has a rich personal legacy.

"I run into people all the time who say things like, 'I remember you, I still have that article you wrote on how to shop for shampoo,' " she said.  “People tell me they always look at labels when they buy things because they heard me speak. … It gives my life meaning."

Shapiro doesn't tour the speaking circuit like she used to, but she still makes occasional appearances -- in fact, she was on Detroit's NBC affiliate on Wednesday morning.  And she still has plenty of sage advice for consumers, who she says are still falling for essentially the same scams they did 50 years ago.

"We don't learn our lesson because we don't want to," she said. "We seize upon the immediate. ...Someone who sounds knowledgeable and offers to solve your problems, you're going to take it and not ask questions because you don't want the answers, you just want the solution."

But the persistence of the current recession, which by now has squeezed many people out of their life savings and left them with no margin for error, plays a big role in the vulnerability of consumers, she said. She thinks consumers are worse off today than they were in 1974, when her agency opened.

"There's a sense of desperation. We're vulnerable, we're bleeding and there's nothing to stop the bleeding," she said.  "I think things are worse because there's less hope. Nobody really believes that employment is going to pick up because we don't see it. No one really believes the stock market is going to recover. I think no one really believes that we'll ever have peace because we're always in a war.  It's this desperation that tears apart whatever we might have built up in defense."

Shapiro's dark words will sound familiar to anyone who's spent time listening to a worried grandmother ("What kind of world am I leaving those kids?" she said several times.)  But her sparking eyes and quick smile -- not to mention her sharp wit and persuasive abilities -- belie her stated pessimism. Shapiro has a deep, abiding faith in the rule of law, and in fairness. And it's clear that deep inside, she thinks fairness will come back into fashion again some day.

"I learned in a high school science class that nothing is every totally destroyed or disappears," she said. "You light a fire to destroy something, but then you have gases, you have ash that stay with the planet. Something is always there. It's never totally lost, and that's what gives me hope. We offer education, we hope someone will hear it, we know it's not going to be lost. That's my faith."

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AT SOUTH STREET COFFEE SHOP, WILMINGTON, OHIO -- When you visit a town of 12,000 people that recently lost 10,000 jobs, you'd expect to find a lot of things:  boarded up homes, abandoned gas stations and empty storefronts to name a few.

What I found in Wilmington, Ohio, was something I didn't expect: opportunity. 

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Mark Rembert is among the youngest Chamber of Commerce presidents in the nation. He says the city's economic misfortune has created opportunity, too.

Small town America has struggled with brain drain since the invention of the automobile. But as it attempts to rise from the ashes of an economic nightmare, this 200-year-old town may have discovered a revolutionary way to attract and keep its young people.

For decades, this small town in southwest Ohio served as crossroads for travelers shuttling between Kentucky and Detroit.  It now sits at a crossroads of the American economy. Every day since the massive DHL package facility that employed the majority of Wilmington's residents closed in 2009, the town has had to ask itself: Will this disaster destroy us, or be our rebirth?

Wilmington has become America's small town in the past three years, a media darling because the recession hit here with almost unmatched brutality.  Jay Leno has been here, and so have "60 Minutes" (twice), Rachel Ray and Glen Beck. It is the lead anecdote in a story about America's disappearing small towns.

There's good reason for that. The discussions taking place on Main Street or in the coffee house may be about local issues, but in the voices of Wilmington's faithful, you hear America talking. 

"Guess I got to be a young man again and work graveyard shifts," said one man sitting at a table without coffee.  He's not young. 

But when you talk to people of Wilmington about their downtrodden state, about their grave misfortune -- and if you are rude enough to ask where the burned out buildings are -- people laugh.

"You're not going to find people crying on the sidewalks here," said Molly Dullea, who operates the General Denver Hotel in downtown Wilmington.  Her brisk pilot crash pad business dried up when DHL ceased operations, but she replaced that with rollicking open mic nights and "draft" beer parties. "We are all taking care of each other here."

Even international media has descended on this place, sometimes labeling it a "ghost town."  

Don't tell that to Roger Walker, who just opened South Street Coffee Shop down the block from the General Denver.  He's living the American dream, leaving his job in Vandalia, Ill., to take the risk of a lifetime.

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Roger Walker just opened a coffee shop in the heart of Wilmington.

"The time was right," Walker said. So was the rent -- about one-tenth the price of similar space in a big city.  "We came here and just fell in love with this town." 

For Mark Rembert, returning to Wilmington was more like reconnecting with an old high school girlfriend after college.  Rembert, who graduated from Wilmington High School in 2003,  was working for an international PR firm in Philadelphia when the DHL disaster struck. After some soul searching, he moved home to try to help.

Within a few months he was running a nonprofit economic development agency and, soon after, became president of the Chamber of Commerce. National TV appearances followed, as did speaches at major conferences, including TED, and awards from places like MTV. 

"If I stayed in Philadelphia I never would have had the opportunities I've had here. It would have taken years for me to get this far," said Rembert, 26.  "And it's all became of Wilmington, and I couldn't be more grateful."

Other young people have picked up on the opportunities, too, helped by a program called Clinton Community Fellows -- Wilmington is in Clinton County.  Students or recent graduates are matched with local businesses where they offer free consulting -- the students receive a stipend from a nonprofit agency at the end of the summer. These are no token work-study programs. Local shop owners are eager to hear any suggestions for saving their business, and the students bring with them fresh ideas like social media marketing.

"I've had responsibilities here I never would have gotten at in internship in Chicago or in New York," said Kelsey Swindler, who's working at a small publishing company. Until recently, she was known as the florist's daughter. "People want to try new things, they need to try new things. ... Who knew my Facebook knowledge would be so valuable."

Dessie Buchanan used to be known simple as "Dr. Buchanan's daughter" around town.  Now, she heads one of Wilmington's most important ventures, as executive director of the farmer's market program.  In this town, "buy local" isn't just a slogan, it's a lifeline.  Buchanan persuaded farmers to move their market into the center of town and expand it to two days per week, and worked with the county so that social service food aid money could be used to pay for fruits and vegetables sold at the market.

"At first they didn't believe in my ideas, but each time something goes well, they listen a little bit more," she said.

Even Dullea swears that possibilities created by the closing of the DHL plant are a godsend -- the farmers market now takes place adjacent to her hotel, right before open mic night, which sometimes attracts 100 people – up from a dozen or so before the crisis. 

"We are better off now," she said, without a hint of doubt in her voice.

That doesn't mean there isn't a whole lot of money missing from this town. The economic swing it has endured is hard to put in perspective. In 2004, German shipping firm DHL purchased what was then Airborne Express as an entree to the U.S. shipping market.  Wilmington's massive airfield, built for U.S. military jets during the cold war, was the largest private airport in the nation, served as an alternate landing site for the space shuttle and was the perfect place to expand into the dot-com fueled shipping business.  At one point, the city essentially had a negative unemployment rate, and DHL bused in part-time workers from counties all over Ohio to help sort packages.

In 2008, it all came crashing down. Mayor David Raizk said one in three households lost income when DHL left. The number of people receiving food assistance from county social services jumped from about 1,500 five years ago to 8,000 today, said Buchanan.

It's Kevin Carver's job to figure out how to fill up the 1,900-acre abandoned plant.  There's no putting a lipstick on that pig. It's now a spooky graveyard of hundreds of DHL airplanes with engines removed, awaiting recycling.  The airpark still operates, with a small airplane repair business and pilot training program. It lands six or seven jets per week -- down from 150 per day.  But every week, a steady stream of investors come to kick the tires on the facility and its hundreds of massive loading docks.  Some of its buildings are nearly brand new.

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Finding someone to fill the enormous vacant DHL airport facility is Kevin Carver’s problem. He heads the Clinton County Port Authority which now owns the site.

Carter, executive director of the Clinton County Port Authority, has one big thing going for him: before DHL left, it gave the airport to the city, which now controls its future.  The town is currently studying the best route to redevelopment.

Mayor Raizk was raised at the town's Quaker-founded college, where his father was a teacher and athletics coach. The school's gym even bears his father's name.  He's had to channel his dad's inspirational abilities many times during the current crisis.

"When you're at a small school, you may not have the best talent, so when you're losing by 20 points you have to really pull together and play for each other," he said.  His job is far from over. Unemployment has stabilized, and local businesses say they've gotten used to the new normal ... getting by with less.  But if the crisis were a 24-hour day, with DHL's withdrawal acting as midnight, Raizk says it'd be about 6 a.m.

"The sun is coming up," he said. "But there's a lot of work to do."

Like every small town I've ever visited, Wilmington has many outsized claims to fame. The city of Denver was named after former Wilmington resident General James William Denver, who also lent his name to the hotel. The town's old-style Murphy Theater opened in 1918, built by former Chicago Cubs owner Charles Murphy. They say he paid for it with World Series winnings from 1908 -- the last time the Cubs won (perhaps that's why there is not a newer theater. Some residents claim the banana split was invented here, too.

But if Wilmington can figure out how to survive and thrive in its economic disaster, and hang on to its youth in the process, it will have given America something far more remarkable than a new dessert.

"Can we take this crisis and make this community relevant? We want to be the community that inspires people across the country," said Rembert. "If we turn this around, we will be."

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AT A BUS STOP, IN PITTSBURGH -- Like nearly every other city in America, after three hard recessionary years, the fiscal gyrations of robbing Peter to pay Paul have pretty much been exhausted in Pittsburgh. 

Bob Sullivan / msnbc.com

Public transpoortation was one of the reasons that Jon Robison, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, moved to his east Pittsburgh neighborhood five years ago. But severe bus service cuts mean he's now often stranded as crowded buses pass him by.

Hard decisions about government services are now unavoidable, and the city's Port Authority transportation agency made one the hardest in March -- cutting 29 bus routes and reducing service on 37 more.  Far more severe cutbacks that would have slashed bus service by one-third were stalled by a one-time time cash windfall, but the clock is ticking on those Draconian budget measures designed to plug a $50 million budget gap. Steeper bus cuts are set for 2012, unless millions in new revenue magically appears.

For Jon Robison, the numbers are much more tangible.

"Some days, one, two, even three buses pass me by because they are too full," Robison said.  "So even if you still have bus service, the buses are overcrowded."

Robison, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, relies on public transit to get around. Bus access is one of the reasons the 67-year-old moved with his wife to the east Pittsburgh neighborhood of Oakland five years ago.  He's even president of the transit service's public advisory board. But that doesn't mean he’s exempt from being left waiting in his wheelchair on the sidewalk when a bus flies by that doesn’t have room for him.

"I keep saying if the Legislature won't fund buses, at least it could legalize hitchhiking," he said. 

In a sense, Robison is lucky – none of his bus routes have been eliminated.  Some Pittsburghers in farther out neighborhoods have lost service entirely. Late-night service was hit particularly hard, and it took swing-shift workers with it.

One downtown office building security guard I interviewed said he works from 4 p.m. to midnight, and the service cuts eliminated the 12:20 bus -- the last bus.

“I don’t know why they didn’t cut a bus in the middle of the day that no one would notice,” he said. “Losing that last bus really hurt.”  He said he knows some employees who’ve had to quit.  For him, taking a taxi home at night adds $200 to his monthly transit costs, a significant bite out of his salary. He couldn't afford to lose the job, however, which is why he requested anonymity.

Driving isn't such a great option either. Pittsburghers just trying to get to work feel like they're being hit on all sides by city and county governments that seem to have an insatiable appetite for new fees.  Prices at city-operated parking garages have doubled in recent years.  Sidewalk meter rates jumped 100 percent, too-- a quarter now only gets you seven minutes. Meanwhile, stickers hastily placed on parking signs all over town antagonize drivers further, announcing meter enforcement now runs until 10 p.m., four hours earlier than the old 6 p.m. cutoff. And parking ticket enforcement agents are everywhere.

"I know that it hurt many of the people I work with currently ... because now we have no option but to pay to park in a parking garage," said Bernard Rafferty, who works at a bank. "And I am sure that there has been a hit to evening business downtown with enforcement until 10."

Frustration over this big squeeze reaches a boiling point for some residents, however, when discussion turns to construction of the new passenger rail transit tunnel. The $500 million project will connect the city's North Shore to downtown, and help move fans to sports stadiums and casinos north of the Allegheny River.  The federal government is picking up most of the tab; still, commuters are frustrated that millions are being spent on what critics have labeled a "tunnel to nowhere," while a fraction of that spending could have spared the city's bus system.

Throwing sand in the face of frustrated bus riders was Sen. John McCain's ranking of the Pittsburgh transit tunnel as No. 3 on a list of projects partially funded by the 2009 fiscal stimulus bill passed by congress that are wasting taxpayer money.  

But Brian O'Neill, revered Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist and author of The Paris of Appalachia, takes a much longer view of the project.

"This is a common criticism, but we're talking about two different pots of money. The federal government paid 95 percent of the construction costs of this project, and if it didn’t go here it would have gone someplace else,” he said. “And if you ever wanted light rail to extend further north you've got to get it across river somehow. ... But this came at bad time because it's a huge amount of money, and a smaller amount would have saved the buses."

Pennsylvania had another idea to save the buses -- it was going to turn Interstate 80 into a toll road, but the U.S. Department of Transportation rejected that idea in April 2010. That leaves the system running with a yawning budget gap, little hope in sight and few ideas for a new dedicated funding source.

How did things fall so far, so fast, in Pittsburgh? The refrain should sound familiar to most cities.  The Port Authority which runs the system now spends just as much -- $32 million a year -- on health care for retired employees as for current employees.  Healthcare and pension costs have risen at an annual rate of 22 percent in the past 10 years. The agency describes these costs as a "death spiral."

"Nothing ever gets done until there's a crisis," O'Neill said. "So here's the crisis."

These unsustainable increases aren't the systems' only problem; but failure to get a handle on them will undoubtedly lead to more service cuts -- and more crowded buses leaving Robison on the sidewalk in his wheelchair, late for his next appointment in town.

“It’s a drag but it’s a natural consequence of a shortage of funding,” he said. “There just isn’t enough money to go around.”

In Washington D.C., with a full tank of gas -- Mark Rembert isn't just fighting for Wilmington, Ohio. He says he's fighting for the survival -- in fact, the very soul -- of small town America. 

Rembert, 26, graduated from Wilmington High School in 2003 and moved away to find opportunity. But five years later, a different kind of opportunity emerged back home.   

If you look at a recession scorecard, you'll see that Wilmington is the hardest-hit town in Clinton County, which is the hardest hit county in Ohio, which is among the hardest-hit states in the union. The basics are simple – Wilmington, a quaint place in southwestern Ohio not far from the Kentucky border,  has 12,000 residents and, in 2008, delivery firm DHL closed its 10,000-job operation in the town's air park. But Rembert, who had opportunities in places like New York or Philadelphia, decided to go home to try to save his small town. He now heads the county Chamber of Commerce and is part of a development fund trying to attract new businesses to Wilmington.

Rembert’s battle is a fight you'll find all across America, as the nation's economic malaise settles into to its third year and the dreaded double-dip recession looms. At this crucial juncture in the U.S. battle to get out of the quicksand laid by the burst of the housing bubble in 2008, msnbc.com's Red Tape Chronicles is taking a second annual road trip across the country. We'll visit small, medium, and large towns, and listen to people tell their stories of trying to get ahead -- or stay afloat -- while the dual pressures of dogged unemployment and government spending cutbacks continue to turn the screws.

 Extreme times bring out the best -- and worst -- of human nature. We'll look for both. There will be stories of inspiration, like Rembert's never-say-die spirit. There will be tales of shame and inhumanity, as we'll find in Chicago, when we talk to families who have spent more than three years trying to beat back the red tape involved in trying to save their homes from foreclosure.  We'll see the reality of budget cuts in Pittsburgh, where mass transit cutbacks and parking meter price hikes are suffocating commuters just trying to make it to work on time. We'll meet a 94-years-young woman who still acts as a consumer advocate for the people of Michigan, and a 22-year-old in Omaha who's among the best in the world at warning kids about the dangers of identity theft.

At each stop during our two-week journey from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, we'll talk to people who have taken on their own version of Rembert’s cause.

"When the crisis hit, it was very personal," Rembert told me. "At that moment, the very future of our community was called into question. And we had to ask the hard question: Why do we care about the future of this place?"

In a way, Wilmington is lucky.  It's calamitous economic fate brought the town outsized notoriety. The news magazine "60 Minutes" profiled it two years ago, and NBC "Tonight Show" comedian Jay Leno came to give a free concert and community pep talk.  Since then, a steady stream of mass media has parachuted in, looking for Wilmington to serve a bit as a weather vane for the rest of small town  America.

There are success stories -- a new downtown coffee shop just opened on South Street last month, and we'll meet the man who took the risk of opening a new business in a town rocked by job loss. 

But it's unfair to place the bellwether burden on Wilmington.  Even Rembert, whose infectious enthusiasm has managed to draw the attention of Fox host Glen Beck, admits he doesn't have many answers yet.

"Other towns call us looking for a formula they can apply to their town. We don't have one," he said.

But he does have plenty of ideas; ideas about self-sustaining communities that produce and consume what they need; ideas about the importance of having sense of place, and why Americans must return to understanding how "hometown" and "identity" are inextricably linked.  He doesn't want every 21-year-old in every small town in America to face the choice of leaving home for opportunity in the city or staying home and facing economic suicide. 

And besides, most people are stuck where they are now, anyway. With one-third of American homeowners "under water," the 1990s concept of extreme labor portability is basically dead.  People can't move for job opportunities now because they can't sell their homes.  In a new, forced version of community stability, Americans have to figure out how to be happy where they are.  That might be a surprising stroke of good luck, Rembert says.

"There is a renewed sense of the fight for place in America," he said. "Small towns are a great place to start because, while they might be poor in resources, they are rich in social capital."

During the next two weeks, we hope to tap into some of that social capital, and to take the temperature of the America that lives between the coasts.  I hope you'll come along for the ride. 

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