This year, instead of having to file our federal taxes by April 15th as we usually do, we didn’t have to file until April 18th. For those living in the states of Massachusetts, Wisconsin or Maine, the due date wasn’t until April 19th. I asked a lot of people if they knew why the filing deadline had been extended and not one knew the answer. Not one.

As it turns out, on April 15th this year the IRS observed a holiday. Which one, you ask? I’ll get to that. It isn’t a federal holiday, although it commemorates an important event; it’s a holiday that is observed by the residents of Washington DC and it gives all public employees in that city the day off. The actual holiday is April 16th. However, since April 16th fell on a Saturday this year, DC residents observed the holiday on Friday April 15th. This year, the IRS observed the holiday along with Washington DC — on April 15th.

The holiday observed on April 18th by Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Maine is called, well…in Massachusetts and Wisconsin it’s called Patriots’ Day, while in Maine it’s called Patriot’s Day. Maine places the apostrophe differently - making the possessive form of the word individual rather than collective. Grammar aside, the day commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord, the first of the American Revolutionary War. Those battles were originally fought on April 19, 1775. However, they are now observed the third Monday in April, no matter the date.

The holiday that the IRS observed along with Washington DC this year is called Emancipation Day. It celebrates the Compensated Emancipation Act signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on April 16, 1862. It paid slave owners $300 for each slave they had owned. The Compensated Emancipation Act freed over 3000 slaves but only in the District of Columbia as Lincoln was unable to convince other states to go along with his compensation plan (that amounted to a bail out of the District’s slave owners, if you will) as the federal government only had control of the District. According to Wikipedia, “The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act represents the only example of compensation by the federal government to former owners of emancipated slaves”. The Emancipation Proclamation came nine months later and freed over three million slaves - with no compensation to slave owners.

There are other Emancipation Days celebrated in other states and other countries. At the end of the week I’ll be attending a Passover Seder, commemorating the deliverance of the Jews from slavery more than 33 centuries ago. The British Empire enacted legislation in 1833 ending slavery and many of its former colonies, including Canada as well as others in the Caribbean, celebrate their versions of Emancipation Day. In the US, some States, including Mississippi, Kentucky, Texas and Florida also celebrate their own versions of the holiday.

In the District of Columbia the holiday was observed officially from 1866 until 1901 and then it disappeared for over a century. According to Wikipedia, “On January 4, 2005, Mayor Anthony A. Williams signed legislation making Emancipation Day an official public holiday in the District. Although Emancipation Day occurs on April 16, by law when April 16 falls during a weekend, Emancipation Day is observed on the nearest weekday”. Writing in the Washington Post the following year, Courtland Milroy gave the credit for the revival of Emancipation Day to Loretta Carter Hanes, whom he called “Emancipation Day’s unsung champion”. She was also the creator of Reading is Fundamental or RIF.

Since the IRS recognizes the District’s holidays, this year it extended the filing deadline for the entire country because Emancipation Day this year is observed on April 15th. And as aforementioned, there are three states that received a further extension because they observe a holiday that commemorates the earliest battles of the American Revolution.

The ironies abound.

On license plates issued for cars owned by Washington DC residents you will see the slogan “Taxation Without Representation” across the bottom. It’s been there since 2000 and is a variant of “No taxation without representation” which according to Wikipedia “is a slogan originating during the 1750s and 1760s that summarized a primary grievance of the American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies, which was one of the major causes of the American Revolution”. In other words it led to the very battles commemorated by Patriots’ or Patriot’s Day - the holiday celebrated by Wisconsin, Massachusetts and Maine.

The IRS has been at the center of a number of controversies in recent years and there are those that question the need for the agency. And their voices are growing louder. With a tax code containing more than 70,000 pages and growing, perhaps there is a better way. And while no one I asked knew why “tax day” was extended this year, there’s something else that most people are also not aware of. And it’s alarming.

John Williams is an economist who publishes a website called shadowstats.com. He crunches many of the numbers issued by the federal government including unemployment, inflation, budget numbers and others. According to him, if you kept federal spending at current levels and taxed everyone in the United States 100%, you would not balance the budget - the US would still have a budget deficit. Read that again and let it sink in. More on that revolutionary piece of information next time.