EXTRA: Help! We need another holiday to further delay Tax Day

Let’s hear it for Emancipation Day – meant to pay tribute to Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Within the District of Columbia with its significant African-American population, that’s a full-fledged holiday with workers getting the day off. And because of the quirks of federal holidays, those D.C.-based workers for the U.S. government have Friday off.

WHICH ALSO IS Tax Day – the deadline for filing our income tax returns for 2015.

So the end result is that the whole country gets a three-day extension, until Monday, to file those returns and pay what is owed (or seek an extension until mid-October, if necessary).

Unless you happen to live in Massachusetts, where it is Patriot’s Day on Monday (celebrating the beginning of what is now known as the American Revolution).

Those people get until Tuesday.

I’LL BE THE first to admit that as I write this, I haven’t even started calculating my return. As a freelance writer, nobody is withholding taxes on my behalf. So I have to figure out this weekend how much I owe, then determine where I get the money from to pay up my share of supporting the federal and Illinois state governments.

In the latter case, it will be my share of the funds that cannot legally be spent until Illinois officials get off their high horses and come up with a budget proposal for the fiscal year that is nearly over – along with the year that will begin in another couple of months.

But all of this has me wondering whether we should try to concoct yet another holiday – one that could push off the Tax Day deadline for a few more days. I’m sure some people could use all the time they are given to adequately prepare a return.

Although I suspect such a holiday, regardless of what we’d call it, would amount to little more than Procrastinators Day – for all those people who honestly believe you should never put off until tomorrow what can easily be done the day after that!

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