As Congress prepares for the imminent debates over the GOP’s plan for tax reform, it is important for the public to revisit its own underlying assumptions about what it expects to get out of the tax system and where government revenue should come from.

As it is currently, the federal tax code is a mess of special interests fighting over who should be winners and losers in a self-defeating and contradictory way. It has no direction or goals other than to serve the interests of those groups organized enough to deploy lobbyists.

For example, we simultaneously structure income taxes progressively while viciously defending highly regressive deductions like mortgage interest. Does anyone from any ideological perspective truly think this is intelligent policy? No, not if they’re honest, but it persists because of the shallow and petty victories interest groups have managed to achieve by making it political suicide to imagine out loud what a rational tax system would look like.

The resulting cost of this dysfunction falls mostly on young and poor people in the form of lower incomes and higher costs of living. Luckily, if special interest can be overcome, there is a way to structure taxes that is logical and will make life affordable again for average people. We should replace income tax to the fullest extent possible with a land value tax.

The principle underlying the land value tax is fairly straightforward. We should not tax things that add value to and grow our economy, and we should tax things that do not add value to and grow our economy.

In this way, we maximize the amount of services we receive from the government while minimizing the amount we have to pay for them with our earned income. Most people would agree with this in the abstract, but the key to making this axiom relevant to the real world is the correct identification of what type of investment does not grow the economic pie. This is clearly the case with unmodified land and resources; hence a tax on their value is justified.

Unmodified land holds enormous value in the United States despite that value not being derived from human effort. Yet, individuals and firms can own and profit from these constantly rising values without giving anything back to the economy, and pay the same tax rates as those who are actually contributing!

Compare that to how we treat something that actually grows our economy, like development. A newly built house takes human effort from planning, building, and marketing and liquefies it into forms of value people can live off of. It is this fundamental mechanism that drives our economy, yet we discourage it with property and income taxes.

What human effort went into creating land and resources? The land exists regardless of us. The supply is always fixed. If we taxed the value of land at 100 percent, it would not slow economic growth because it would not be a tax on human effort (unlike a property or income tax) and would provide society with the revenue necessary to ensure the most unfortunate among us don’t fall into the grasps of poverty. Adam Smith himself said of a land tax, “nothing could be more reasonable.”

The effects of transitioning away from taxes on effort to a tax on the inherent value of the land we all share would be profound. Depending on the extent of the replacement, real incomes would rise while developers would be incentivized to build up rather than out, reducing urban sprawl and decreasing the tax burden per resident on housing, lowering the cost of living. Reduced urban sprawl would also put less strain on our infrastructure budgets.

Decreased government services would not have to be a trade off for this to occur, either. The revenue raised through a land value tax could easily offset the losses from a decreased income tax at least enough to make a significant difference and keep tax revenue roughly the same. Safety nets and the defense budget should not feel threatened by this proposal.

The flaws in our current tax system are big. There is a built in bias against young and working-class people fueled by the presence of the income tax and an absence of a land value tax, driving costs up and incomes down in favor of catering to an older, landowning class. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn’t be this way.

Wes Collier is a fourth-year food and resource economics major at the University of Florida.