WASHINGTON A testy battle over the U.S. economy turned nasty Sunday as U.S. President George W. Bush, accused of distorting rival democratic proposals, deployed his economic big guns across the airwaves.

White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and Commerce Secretary Don Evans joined the front lines to defend the president's economic stimulus package on the morning talks shows.

They were drafted in a day after the president launched a withering attack on Democratic Senator Tom Daschle's competing economic plan by stating that tax hikes would be considered "over my dead body."

Daschle, in a statement released to the U.S. media following the president's remarks, accused Bush of deliberately distorting his fiscal proposals which he pointed out included short-term tax cuts and spending increases, not tax hikes, AFP reported.

However, Lindsey, speaking on CBS television's "Face the Nation" show, rejected charges that Bush was distorting Daschle's plan.

"He (Daschle) called for significant increases in spending," Lindsey said. "The only way you can finance those is with tax increases. It is as simple as that. So that's what the president was responding to."

Bush is campaigning for the adoption of his stimulus package, proposed in october and passed by the House of Representatives but blocked in the Democratic-run senate.

Daschle says the stimulus plan favors big corporations and does too little for the poor and the unemployed, many of whom lost jobs as the economy suffered following the September 11 terrorist onslaught on the United States.

On Friday Daschle blamed Bush's $1.35-trillion, 11-year tax cut program passed earlier this year for the "most dramatic fiscal deterioration in our nation's history."

"Not only did the tax cut fail to prevent a recession, as its supporters said it would, it probably made the recession worse," the South Dakota senator said as both major parties began gearing up for the November 2002 midterm congressional elections.

O'Neill, on NBC's "Meet the Press," defended Bush's tax cut and said Democratic fiscal policy made no sense.

"It's strange economics," he said. "To entertain the notion that we can help the economy by raising taxes does not makes sense at all."

He said the stimulus package should be passed as soon as possible so the U.S. economy good generate jobs and wealth and reverse the return to deficit spending.

"The way to solve the deficit problem is to have a robust economic activity, for the U.S. to be the economic engine of the world," O'Neill said.

In an interview with ABC's "This Week" program, Evans chided Democrats who saw tax hikes as a way out of recession, and urged them to stop "worrying about politics" in an election year.

"There ought to be the spirit of U.S. coming together and doing what is right for the American people and not worrying about politics," Evans insisted.

However, Democrats argued that nothing should be ruled out -- even tax hikes -- in the drive to pull the United States out of recession and avoid budget deficits.

"I think it's wrong for anyone, president or any one of us, to say anything is off the table as we try to get our economy going again," Senator Joseph Lieberman said on NBC.