Change? How about more of the same.

President Obama’s decision to embark on our most recent international misadventure in Libya proves what the most cynical political observers have been saying all along: elections don’t matter.

In 2003, President Bush signed a secret order authorizing covert action to remove from office a brutal dictator that ruled against the will of his people. Oh wait! Rather, that was President Obama just a few weeks ago, secretly pushing for regime change in Libya while publicly denying that the U.S. was pursuing such a measure. Obama and Bush’s policies are so similar that sometimes it’s hard to remember which President bears responsibility for what.

Regardless of the campaign promises made by politicians from either side of the aisle, the practical result always seems to be the same. The federal debt grows with no end in sight, the government increasingly intrudes on the freedoms of private citizens and our nation’s military expansively serves roles of dubious importance across the world in countries that most Americans can’t find on a map.

Obama’s actions in Libya are just the most recent in a long line of ruinous policies the president has taken from his predecessor’s playbook.

President Bush spent billions to cope with the mortgage crisis, only to be outdone by Obama. He spent hundreds of billions on a stimulus package to combat the recession, promising it would keep unemployment under 8 percent. Two years later, the unemployment rate has just inched its way below 9 percent.

The similarities don’t end there. In 2003, Bush passed a drug prescription benefit plan costing $500 billion that he made no pretense of paying for. In 2010, Obama doubled down, signing a health-care bill into law costing in excess of $1 trillion. Health care spending is now greater than one-sixth of our annual Gross Domestic Product, and our last two presidents have only helped to accelerate that trend.

In response to the accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom at the beginning of the last decade, Bush enacted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, greatly damaging the attractiveness of America’s capital markets while failing to reduce corporate fraud. The Dodd-Frank Act, Obama’s other (largely unnoticed) 2,300 page monstrosity, does nothing to address the too-big-to-fail phenomenon that allowed the largest banks to gamble recklessly on the housing markets. It seems more important for our presidents to react quickly to corporate misbehavior than to react effectively.

In fairness to our last two presidents, Congress shares plenty of responsibility for the policy ineptitude this country has pursued since the end of the 20th century. And both the Democrats and Republicans are equally to blame. In fact, the only remaining distinction between the donkeys and the elephants is that the Democrats are the party of tax-and-spend while the GOP is the party of don’t tax-and-spend. Other than that, it matters little what color hat our elected representatives wear in office.

The striking resemblance between the policies of the last two years and the previous eight are almost too numerous to list. Education reform, unpaid for tax cuts and the war on terror have been approached in almost exactly the same way by this administration as the last.

As a candidate, President Obama presented himself as the polar opposite of the man he would replace. That narrative has proven to be almost comically incorrect. True change, it seems, is still yet to come.

Josh is a junior in Business.