A version of this blog appears on the Red Letter Christians blog.

With the cost of living crisis engulfing most of us, there is a head of steam building behind questions of who should be taxed and how.

Last week the Wealth Tax Commission published its beefy report, earlier this week Tax Justice UK detailed five policies that could net the exchequer £37bn and later in the week a coalition of groups working in this area have come together as Stop the Squeeze, offering a package of ideas, including reforms of the tax system for us all to get behind.

The immediate catalyst for this is Trussonomics and the disastrous Kwateng financial statement that sent the markets into a spin and put the UK’s borrowing costs up to levels not seen since Black Wednesday back in  the early 1990s. In the wake of that, the new government has talked ominously about tax rises and spending cuts to balance the books.

This has precipitated those who have long been lobbying for a rethink of our tax system to get their ideas out into the public square and attempt to get momentum behind a campaign for significant change in how we think about tax in this country.

By and large conversation about taxation here tends to focus on taxes on income and spending. We can tinker a bit with the rates here and there but they do not have a massive impact on the amount of money the government has to spend.

Now leaving aside arguments that governments print the money they need to spend and that government debt is a bit of an illusion – for more on this kind of thinking check out Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy and the peerless Richard Murphy whose portal Tax Research LLP is essential for anyone who wants to be well briefed in this area (more on this in a subsequent post) – what’s to be done?

The tax debate needs to be broadened, according to Tax Justice and Stop the Squeeze to include the wealth of people and not just their income. Simple changes such as equalising capital gains tax and income tax rates could raise £14bn, applying National Insurance to investment income would yield a further £8.6bn. Add to this a 1% wealth tax on assets over £10m and another £10bn could be raised. These changes combined with other tweaks of allowances could swell the government’s income by £37bn, a significant wedge of cash to be spent in public services. And this is not just a one-off; this is annual new tax income.

The British obsession with ownership of land means that such taxes have never been properly considered by anyone in government. Back in the time of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, Richard Murphy and others were involved in the production of a report on land taxes but it never made into a manifesto. Billions of pounds reside under our feet – and in the vast acreage that our feet are not allowed to walk on – that could yield vital income for government services.

Stop the Squeeze – which Red Letter Christians has joined – wants to jump start that conversation. But it wants to go further with reforms of the energy market that mean energy prices are not tied to the most expensive and climate damaging fossil fuels. Sensible pricing of energy generated by renewables, coupled with a massive home insultation policy, could reduce household energy bills by more than half.

Stop the Squeeze also wants to see the minimum wage rising to £15 per hour. Undoubtedly, average earnings in the UK have fallen since the financial crash of 2008 as ordinary working people and the poor have been asked to foot the bill racked up by reckless financial services companies.

I’m disappointed that there is no discussion of universal basic income which would be a massive improvement on universal credit and could go some way to releasing the creativity and enterprise of people at all economic levels by offering financial security while they explore what they were put on the planet to do. I will blog more about this in the coming days.

But that doesn’t answer the question of who would Jesus tax? I would love to see the churches and Christian charities in this country come out from behind the protective wall of their tax reliefs and gift aid and lend their voice to a real debate about tax and pressure for reform in the interests of justice for the poorest which might mean we all pay a bit more to the chancellor.

And this is another issue that I will return to. As a Baptist I have long wondered why we are so closely allied to the state, benefitting from a raft of tax breaks, sheltered from the storm by the largesse of the crown. What are we thinking?