Rep. David Dreier, one of the newly empowered Republicans in the House of Representatives, said Wednesday, "It's often been said that we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem." Shortly thereafter, he and his colleagues took steps to make sure we will have both.

Despite all their talk about fiscal responsibility, the Republicans who took over the House of Representatives this week have opened the door to budget changes that will have a much more lasting impact on the federal deficit than the bailouts or stimulus measures they derided during the last two years. By changing the House rules for spending and revenue legislation, they have clearly indicated either that they are willing to put the pocketbooks of wealthy special interests ahead of the nation's fiscal stability or that they lack a third-grade understanding of arithmetic.

Under the Democrats, the House adopted "pay as you go" rules, which meant that any new spending or tax cut was supposed to be offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget or other new taxes. It wasn't perfect — Democrats could and did exempt measures from it as they saw fit — but at least as a concept, it made sense.

The Republican version of "pay as you go" is "cut as you go." GOP leaders say they were elected by people who don't want taxes raised, so they are eliminating that as an option for offsetting spending. All of it must come from budget cuts. That would make it hard enough to accomplish their stated goal of putting the nation on a path toward a balanced budget if not for the exemptions they've pre-authorized. New spending will be subject to the rule, but new tax cuts won't. That means they could extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanently and pretend that it will have no impact on the budget deficit.

The Republicans have also exempted a repeal of the health care reform bill from their rules because of the inconvenient truth that doing so would increase the size of the deficit by $230 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Mr. Boehner has avoided this problem by declaring that he does not believe the CBO, a stance that opens the door to any sort of fiscal chicanery that politics requires.

A further troubling sign is the rules Republicans have set for themselves on how they will go about cutting the budget. The GOP intends to take federal spending back to fiscal 2008 levels (that is, before President Barack Obama arrived on the scene), but they have said they will not cut defense, homeland security or veterans benefits. The result of that carve-out — mostly due to the size of the defense budget — means the possibility of massive cuts to other important priorities, such as health care and infrastructure spending. It's particularly curious given that the secretary of defense (himself a Republican appointee) at the same time proposed major cuts to a number of wasteful weapons projects and reductions in the number of troops, expected to save $78 billion over five years. If Republicans are so eager to cut, why don't they look where the money is?

The House Republicans' rules won't have a huge impact, of course, because they don't bind the Senate or the president. But they do put a damper on the likelihood of meaningful progress in the next two years on the nation's most daunting problems.

It's hard to recall that just a month ago, the nation appeared ready to have a serious conversation about the difficult choices it will take to balance the federal budget. The bipartisan support for the Bowles/Simpson plan to fix the nation's finances through a balanced program of cuts and taxes provided some optimism that Congress and the president might spend the next two years engaged in the meaningful business of shoring up Social Security and Medicare, simplifying the tax code and realigning spending with our priorities and ability to pay.

Instead, it looks like the House wants to return to the early days of the Bush administration, when Congress enacted massive tax cuts and authorized two wars without a care for how to pay for them. House Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday that Congress could no longer "kick the can down the road," but the moves he and his colleagues made on their first day in office will have just that effect.