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Seth Hanlon is Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank. The opinions expressed here are his own.

This is part of an ongoing series on tax reform ideas. Where do you stand? Come back regularly to be a part of the national debate.

The new GOP majority in the House says that it wants to cut wasteful spending.  But it is poised to vastly expand some of the least effective kinds of government spending: Programs that dole out special tax breaks.

By changing House rules, Republican leaders have exempted newly proposed tax breaks from scrutiny or budget discipline — even as they decry our long-term structural deficits. At a time when we should be scouring the tax code to close loopholes, they have declared it open season for tax lobbyists who want to open up new ones.

The United States will never solve its budget challenges with a tax system that gives away as much money in special tax breaks as it collects in revenue. But that’s precisely what ours does today. And if the proliferation of tax breaks accelerates, we’ll find ourselves deeper in debt, even with devastating cuts to other parts of the budget.

“Most federal non-defense spending, other than Social Security and Medicare, is now done through special tax rules rather than by direct cash outlays,” writes Martin Feldstein, former president Reagan’s top economic adviser.  “When it comes to spending cuts, Congress is looking in the wrong place.”

Tax expenditures — the special deductions, credits, and exemptions that steer subsidies to certain businesses and individuals — cost about $1.1 trillion each year. That’s more than twice as much as all non-security discretionary spending, which is the only area of the budget that Republican leaders have targeted for budget savings.

To be sure, it’s not immediately intuitive to recognize that tax expenditures are equivalent to government spending. Anti-tax ideologues contend that any exemption or deduction — even if created specifically for a handful of taxpayers — merely allows people to keep more of their money.

This view is grounded in a fundamentally meaningless accounting distinction between government outlays and special tax breaks. The economic reality is that tax expenditures are the exact same thing as spending. Here’s an example:

The government gives out about $4 billion a year in special tax breaks to the oil and gas industry. Washington could instead write these companies $4 billion in checks. At the end of the day, whether the money is spent through special tax breaks or direct spending, the oil industry is $4 billion richer and the U.S. treasury is $4 billion poorer.

Just because tax expenditures are government spending programs doesn’t mean we should make indiscriminate, across-the-board cuts to them (as the Republican Study Committee in Congress has proposed to do with vital programs in education, health care, and other areas). Rather, it means we should responsibly scrutinize tax breaks provision-by-provision, as we do the overall budget.

We should weigh the effectiveness of each tax break against its budget cost. We should include wasteful tax breaks in any discussion of spending cuts or spending freezes. And we should subject all tax breaks to budget discipline — because every tax expenditure, by definition, adds to our budget deficit.

Republican leaders are proposing deep cuts to programs that are not only effective, but vital: medical research, Pell Grants, federal nutrition programs. At the same time, many wasteful and ineffective tax breaks have escaped scrutiny.

Singling out direct spending programs that are working while leaving ineffective tax breaks off the table will leave us deeper in debt with nothing to show for it.