No. Basic incomes, by definition, do not taper off. That's what makes them so compelling to economists: schemes that do taper off create steep marginal disincentives to work. Tapering off is the type of thing that sounds appealing--why give multimillionaires a regular check?--but it's a bad idea.
(The name for the policies that do include that tapering off is a guaranteed minimum income, not a basic income.)
Thanks for the clarification, I did not realize the two were different.
> Schemes that do taper off create steep marginal disincentives to work
There is no reason the marginal disincentives need to be steep. You could otherwise make the same argument about progressive income taxes. Those don't seem to disincentivize people from making more money, neither does guaranteed minimum income need to.
I can and do make the same argument about progressive income taxes =) And, to be totally clear about my perspective, I believe all taxes on income are taxes that disincentive work and are economically destructive.
It's not an on-or-off switch: you've got to look at the margins. At the margin, you'll work less if you get $100 in return for an hour's labor than if you get $200 in return for it. Maybe still more than half as much work, but you'll still decrease the amount of labor you perform. Income taxes do exactly that.
It's possible to make the marginal disincentives less steep, but the more you do that, the more you lose the cost savings you were hunting for in the first place.
E.g. imagine a basic income of $20k. And suppose you make it phase out such that at $40k you don't get one. That amounts to a whopping 50% marginal tax rate. And that tax rate is on top of existing taxes, and it's not hard to end up with a result where someone making $30k/year is paying a 75% marginal tax rate. Which is much too high for anyone making so little.
So let's try spreading it out. If it phases out at $60k, that's a 33% marginal tax rate; $80k is 25%; $100k is 20%. That's much better, though still a significant tax. But you've also made the guaranteed minimum income much closer in cost structure to a simple basic income. At least 90% of individuals make less than $100k, and their average per capita income is probably below $40k (remember we're cutting out the long tail that accounts for a large percentage of income). So we're paying out around $12k to each of them on average; and since we cut out the people making above $100k, that's around $11k per person, 55% the direct financial cost of a basic income.
Cheaper, definitely, but you're still going to face sticker shock. And you've paid for the cheapness in the disincentives due to taxes; administrative costs; and in creating incentives to misreport income.
(The name for the policies that do include that tapering off is a guaranteed minimum income, not a basic income.)