A universal basic income has rich people paying poor people and middle income people paying themselves. A basic income with a phase out instead has middle income people paying poor people so the rich can have a tax cut.
This does not have to be true. You can simply phase it out and then adjust the tax structure accordingly. It is a zero sum game, you lower taxes by the same amount you cut the basic income for that person. At the high end you take away 11k basic income and reduce taxes by 11k, somewhere in the middle you reduce the basic income and taxes by 6k each and at the lower end you do nothing.
With matching tax structures there is really no difference between paying an universal basic income to everyone or only paying it towards the lower income range. I am not disagreeing that a flat basic income might be a lot simpler than trying to carefully adjust tax rates.
If there is literally no difference then what benefit is to be gained from the added complexity?
One of the big advantages of a universal basic income is that it gives you effective progressive taxation without a complicated system amoral people can game. If you have different tax rates then it creates opportunities for tax arbitrage and rich people can avoid paying the higher rates by doing things like paying a middle income salary to their otherwise zero-income college-attending children who pay a lower rate.
But flat tax + UBI is inherently progressive, so that's it. No phase outs + no tax brackets does exactly what everyone wanted anyway, but everyone universally pays the same rate and receives the same UBI so there is nothing to game. You get one choice, what the flat tax rate should be, which sets the amount of the UBI and determines how progressive the system is. It takes away all the knobs that politicians who don't know what they're doing (or corrupt politicians who know exactly what they're doing) can use to screw up the economy or shift more of the tax burden from the rich to the middle class.
Which doesn't work when jobs require uncommon abilities or highly specialized training and thus either can't be done by the other people or would be highly inefficient to train them to do and then not have them working full time.
> Some jobs don't provide enough income to make a living? Then have sufficient minimum wages, there is no point in doing any work that does not pay well enough to make a living.
And then any jobs whose economic value is below that minimum wage disappear, leading back to the first problem.
> Also universality, what is the point? Above some income you are essentially just paying yourself.
You are. Which means it has a built in phase out -- you effectively stop getting it once you've paid more taxes than you receive in basic income. Adding another phase out causes the marginal tax rate on middle income people to be unreasonably high and takes money away from them that would otherwise have come from higher income people.
A universal basic income has rich people paying poor people and middle income people paying themselves. A basic income with a phase out instead has middle income people paying poor people so the rich can have a tax cut.