ABSTRACT
President Bill Clinton brought the subject of sin taxes to the fore once again with his 1994 health care reform proposals. The sin tax he would have most liked to increase was the tax on cigarettes. Taxes on articles of con sumption like the cigarette tax are really nothing more than garden-variety selective excise taxes, which have been a part of the U.S. tax code since 1791. It is the characterization of the consumption of the item that leads politicians to refer to certain excise taxes as sin taxes. Webster's New World Dictionary defines sin as “a wrong or fault.” The Clinton administration used the word to refer to consumption of an item that is considered detrimental to an individual’s health (U.S. House 1993, 35).
