Do you always breathe just a little bit easier when you wake up on February 3, so you know you’re not caught living Groundhog Day over and over and over? That’s certainly the way it is for me. Groundhog Day seems to be forever associated with Groundhog Day the movie — even though making BIll Murray’s character relive one day until he finally got it right could have happened on any day at all. Setting the movie on Groundhog Day was just a relatively random choice — people had heard of Groundhog Day, so they’d recognize it, but they didn’t really know much about it. Not that there’s all that much to know, but still.
Regardless, now that we’ve made it to February 3, we can ditch the comedy and the philosophical musings underneath it. That’s what Bill Murry wanted to do, and argued with Harold Ramis, who wanted to emphasize the comedy. But regardless, now we can turn our attention to more day to day matters. You know, like death and taxes. And wouldn’t you know it, February 3 has plenty of both. Back in 1787, in Petersham, Massachusetts, it was February 3 when Shay’s Rebellion was ended by a surprise attack by a militia led by General Benjamin Lincoln. The Rebellion had been lead by Daniel Shays, and had attracted as many as 4,000 men to fight the new government because they objected to the taxes it levied. As far as we know, they didn’t see any irony in rebelling against a government most of them had helped to create by fighting in the Revolutionary War against a British government because they objected to the taxes it levied. I guess taxes are taxes, whether they’re being collected by a colonial government thousands of miles away or an elected government you fought to put into place.
One of the interesting things about Shay’s Rebellion is that the economic conditions at the time were pretty harsh, and the state government was trying to collect taxes in “hard currency.” Nowadays the term means some very reliable form of currency that doesn’t fluctuate much in value. But back in the 1700s, “hard currency” meant coins or precious metal like gold or silver. The central and western areas of Massachusetts were agricultural, extremely rural, and nobody had much, if any, “hard currency.” The interesting part is that about a hundred years earlier, Massachusetts (at the time, the “Massachusetts Bay Colony”) issued the first paper money in North America. That began on February 3, 1690. The Shayists lobbied the state legislature to issue more paper currency (bank notes) to ease the debt crisis they found themselves in, but unlike Governor William Phips in 1690, Governor James Bowdoin declined to do that, and in fact raised taxes. That’s what led to the rebellion.
The reason the Massachusetts government needed to raise taxes was to pay for some of the remaining debts from the Revolutionary War. Wars are expensive, and governments will do almost anything to pay for them. Other than staying out of them, of course; they never seem to be able to do that. The US federal government, at the time of Shay’s Rebellion, didn’t have much power to tax anybody. If they wanted to fight a war, they had to come up with a way to raise money. They did that piecemeal for decades, from the Revenue Act of 1861, which was right around the time of the Civil War, to February 3, 1913, when the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution was ratified — that’s the one that created the income tax. And wait, that was right about the time of World War I. It almost makes you wonder what that old saying “nothing’s sure except death and taxes” is really talking about, doesn’t it?
There are some other February 3 events that have to do, broadly speaking, with money and economics as well as taxes. One of today’s hard currencies is the Euro, and February 3, 1958 was the day the Benelux Union was formed. It was a cooperative agreement between the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, forming an economic union that became the forerunner of the European Economic Community. The EEC, in turn, was incorporated into the European Union in 1993, and that’s the source of the Euro.
Oddly enough, on the very day the Benelux Union was formed, February 3, 1958, Douglas Holtz-Eakin was born in Philadelphia. He grew up to be a prominent economist and director of the Congressional Budget Office, among other things. And as long as we’re listing coincidences, that same day another baby was born not too far away from Holtz-Eakin, in Trenton, New Jersey. That baby was Greg Mankiw, who also grew up to be a prominent economist and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, among other things. But wait, we’re not done. It was exactly one year later, February 3, 1959 that Oscar Zuluaga was born in Colombia. He, too, grew up to be a prominent economist and Minister of Finance and Public Credit in Colombia, among other things.
But we weren’t just talking about economics, we were talking about mortality too. And it was February 3, 1802 that Pedro Rodriguez died. He had been a prominent economist — although they didn’t have the word in those days — whose work on ways to stimulate the economy in Spain was influential for many decades. He’s the one who pointed out that guilds should open their membership in order to revive their fortunes. He advised allowing women to join the workforce. And he was a strong advocate of the then-new notion of industrialization. And finally (did I detect a sigh of relief?), it was February 3, 2016 that Jozsef Kasza died. He was a prominent economist in Serbia and Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia, among other things.
So welcome to February 3, and congratulations on making it this far. You can take that in several ways, of course. I think the main lessons of the day are to pay your taxes, keep your assets in a hard currency, and look for Spring, which is coming soon. After all, Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring, but Staten Island Chuck said nope, it’s going to be six more weeks of winter. And speaking of mortality, Milltown Mel passed away just a few days before The Big Prediction. Because one more lesson we take from the day after Groundhog Day is that thanks to the marmots, we know that either winter is going to last six more weeks, or Spring will be here in a mere month and a half.
