Clearly, the movie makers chose Ana's tax protest as something that would appeal to their intended audience. They did not, however, think through the issue. A cafeteria style of tax protest would not improve the income tax in any of the most important respects. For example, it would wildly increase the inequity of the tax burden among taxpayers, because everybody could in effect choose his own marginal rate. (Some people would become tax protestors solely in order to lower their tax bills, of course, and wealthy individuals and big corporations would want in on it, too.)

It would also make tax returns even more complex to fill out (more schedules, more tables), and it would make the tax law less transparent because the government would inevitably fail to draft clear standards for distinguishing acceptable and unacceptable protest. Finally, it would increase the cost of administering the income tax due to the additional time auditors would spend determining whether any protest were sincere and whether the taxpayer had used the correct percentage allocable to the item she didn't want to pay for. And that cost, remember, would be borne by all of us through the collection of taxes.

Nor does it help that Ana's protest centers on the national defense budget. Not untypically, I'm afraid, she enjoys the rights and prosperity protected by our military strength but doesn't have sense enough to be grateful. And have the movie makers considered that if we were able to pick and choose among categories of taxes, there would be a certain, perhaps substantial, number who would gladly pay for tanks and not swing-sets, or do they think that tax protest is acceptable only for people who agree with them? I felt like I was being talked down to by children, and I wanted to answer back that democracy, like playing with other kids, does not mean you always get your own way.

More important to the story is the fact that Ana bakes an assortment of cookies especially for Harold, who "can't" take them because of the policy forbidding an auditor to accept gifts. (The policy is reasonable, but Ana takes it personally and is offended.) In this scene he also reveals that his mother never baked cookies for him. Thus, the banality lies not in the usual battle between numbers and words, which is always, always, always won by words — in movies put out by some of the most saber-toothed number-crunchers in the world. (Even Helm will have sent his agent to negotiate as high a price as possible before letting his script be filmed.) Rather, it lies in a numbers-versus-cookies contest, and cookies here stand not just for comfort and emotional connection, but world-friendly values as well. (Does Helm think September 11 could have been avoided if we'd just sent cookies to Osama bin Laden?)