The only real purposes of taxation are to force people to keep using the fiat currency as a means of payment (maintain currency monopoly) and also to maintain scarcity of the currency as this helps to keep inflation under control (at least for consumables). But it doesn't actually prevent inflation in absolute terms because the government usually ends up spending more than it collects in taxes anyway (take loans from the Fed by creating new bonds); they mostly care about having inflation lower or proportional to other countries, not about preventing inflation.
The only way to pay off the debt would be to change the mechanism via which money enters the economy so that it is no longer tied to a debt as it does so. But then the question would be who should receive all that new debt-free money? Probably it will be big corrupt megacorporations via insanely large government contracts.