It really all depends. If the US government were to discover a way to make cold fusion work and builds a reactor then would it be such a bad idea to give all citizens a basic income once you have abundant energy? In the current time where we don't have cold fusion we cannot see where the future growth is going to come from to pay the debt. If we wake up tomorrow with cold fusion then we know automation can be built with nearly unlimited energy so the debt will not need to be paid by human beings. Suddenly basic income becomes physically and scientifically feasible but politically might still be difficult because to do it through centralized political means is still hard even if you have the science right.

Labor does not have to come from humans and as long as you have abundant energy you have the potential for abundant labor. Debt is labor owed but automation can easily produce the value and do the labor. The debt and or even the majority of taxes could be paid by robots and AI in the future if we politically determine to take that route. There is no real reason to believe only a human being can pay a tax nor is there a reason to believe we can't have intelligent agents which own themselves.

If we develop the technology it is certainly possible to built a smart contract (intelligent agent) on some future platform similar to Ethereum which starts out owned by humans, but then which buys-back all of it's shares until it keeps 100% of it's profits. In that case it could be programmed to give some percentage as basic income or it could be programmed to pay taxes when it operates on a jurisdiction in physical space such as if it runs a network of self driving cars as part of a cyber physical system which operate in New York. Of course it should pay federal and state taxes even if it's a self owned intelligent agent operating on the blockchain and even if it can't be shut down. It could pay these taxes as a tribute to humanity or pay it just so the humans who built it will be perceived as heroic.

Enough tax paying intelligent agents like these and eventually if a majority of the labor is automated the tax payers eventually become mostly intelligent agents as well. This would allow automation to directly pay down the debt while freeing humanity at least in theory. Unfortunately our society is not run by engineers, scientists, so even if a clear solution like this does exist it is doubtful the political class will have the foresight to think about it as they can barely wrap their heads around smart contracts.