The problem with programs like GI21 is that they cannot have any fatal flaws. One tends to think of flaws in programs in terms of plus or minus, but often they are more make or break, or, to be really precise, break or not. Like all Basic Income that build their church on the rock of anti-poverty, GI21 creates unacceptable negative work effects that cannot be tweaked away. If the purpose of the program is to eliminate poverty, escaping poverty by any other means acquires an opportunity cost that should not be there. It's a bad idea from the very start.

The only "tweak" that makes sense is to go full Yang (or Thomas Paine, for that matter) and recognize that the eliminating poverty is a politically powerful consequence of what is essentially a pre-distribution of wealth created using an infrastructure to which we all contribute, if only by respecting private property. Yang calls it a "freedom dividend," which is nice, but it's really a capitalism dividend, a recognition that we should all own preferred shares in every business that operates on our soil, because without our sufferance, none of them could.

We are all beneficiaries of free enterprise as consumers of what our system allows to be produced. But there is nothing wrong with the political decision that the amount of wealth one can accumulate (or bequeath) and the amount of poverty others must endure varies with the abundance of goods and services in the economy.

The tax system already purports to be somewhat redistributive, and, indeed, I would implement a UBI through the tax code, but I see no reason for a phase-out, other than alleged cost.

My UBI pays a fixed amount to adults, and maybe something for the first two kids, but taxes the payment as ordinary income. Maybe we increase the standard deduction so that lower wages aren't taxed too heavily, but that's a detail. The key, though, is that the purpose of the plan is not to eliminate poverty but to share the abundance. The latter aim can't help but alleviate poverty, and I have no problem with pols selling it as such, but we need to understand that the plan arises from mutually supported abundance and not from desperately needed charity.

Not surprisingly, the goal of completely eliminating poverty is costly.

I disagree. https://remarklj.medium.com/how-do-you-pay-for-a-ubi-451a5cb505f4