PIGOU ACCEPTS QUARTERS. The latest government revenue enhancements include new corrective taxes.

If you make big bucks — or enjoy alcohol, cigarettes and Coke — the government might hit you up to pay for fixing the nation’s health care system.

Leave aside the editorial position inherent in that "fixing". The tax is a standard issue externality tax. Chicago has such a tax on pop by the cup (one reason self-service pop dispensers are rare in city limits) supposedly to cover the cost of emptying the rubbish bins. The article sees the revenue potential.

Still, it’s easy to see why the bad-habits tax was so tempting: Taxing tobacco, junk foods and alcohol could raise $600 billion over 10 years.

There's an attractive technical reason as well. If the goods have relatively inelastic demands, the excess burden of the taxes will be less than that of taxes on more price-sensitive consumption.

The article doesn't go there. It notes that the taxes might be sacrificial decoys, proposed now to be laughed off, before the politicians come up with compromise proposals likely to have greater excess burdens as well as greater illusions of fairness.