1. Taxis are a dying industry, but taxi drivers are not adapting.
2. As a result, taxi drivers are suffering. Their livelihoods, which have brought food to their families' tables for decades, are being taken from them by forces they could not anticipate or control.
Of course,
3. We care about these taxi drivers. Suffering is bad no matter what industry you work in. Suffering is worth avoiding.
Ultimately our answer has to be to say "your job doesn't really exist anymore, you need to find a new one". But it matters how much time we give taxi drivers. Clearly, asking them to adapt overnight would be too demanding, so there's a balance to be made between market efficiency and the realities of our apish learning rates.
In the long run, a lot of jobs are going the way of the taxi, and perhaps basic income is the long-term solution. But we can't implement basic income today. It's a massive solution to what is currently a minor, contained problem.
Every country's policies are a gigantic legacy codebase. Basic income would be re-writing a huge chunk of the code, where this tax is adding yet another minor hack to keep the thing running smoothly.