"The president has made one of his bottom lines that significant revenues have to be on the table," said Chuck Loveless, the director of legislation for AFSCME, a major public services employees union. "If he sticks to his guns on that, I'm not worried, but chained CPI is on his short list. We oppose that, and it is a significant cut to Social Security."
"These cuts are clearly on the Republican agenda," he added, pointing to a proposal from House Republicans to raise the Medicare eligibility age, which Obama rejected.
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman said that his Republican colleagues in Congress have long been "gunning for the entitlements."
"So I worry about it," Waxman said. "But I also worry about the economy, because it seems to me, they don't worry about dragging down the economy while they're trying to gain leverage to hurt those entitlements."
The AFL-CIO, the country's largest federation of unions, released a statement this week urging Congress to repeal, not replace, the sequester, arguing that cuts to social security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits were a form of "Republican ransom demands."
"There's no need to replace the sequester in full or in part. We don't need it," said Kelly Ross, deputy policy director of AFL-CIO. "Republicans are saying we need to address the source of the problem as leverage to get entitlement cuts."
"The worry is that Republicans have been very clear what they want from this — and that's entitlement reform," said Ross. "That's what they hope to get out of it, while they're saying no to taxes. Both sides are crying uncle."
