left in 1985 to become a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, where he specialized in tax policy and was involved in the debate around the Tax Reform Act of 1986. George H. W. Bush administration In 1987, Bartlett became a senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Policy Development, then headed by Gary Bauer. He left in 1988 to become the deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, where he served until the end of the George H. W. Bush administration. Afterwards, Bartlett worked briefly at the Cato Institute in 1993. From 1993 to 2005, Bartlett was affiliated with the National Center for Policy Analysis, a free-market think tank based in Dallas, Texas. Since 1995, he has written a newspaper column for Creators Syndicate, based in Los Angeles, and written extensively for many newspapers and magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune magazine, and Commentary magazine. Political positions Criticism of George W. Bush administration economic policy In 2005, the National Center for Policy Analysis fired Bartlett for his criticism of President George W. Bush. In 2006, he published Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, which is critical of the George W. Bush administration's economic policies as departing from traditional conservative principles. He described Bush and Richard M. Nixon as "two superficially conservative presidents who enacted liberal programs to buy votes for reelection." In his 2009 book, The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward, Bartlett defended Keynesian economic policies, stating that while supply-side economics had been appropriate for the 1970s and 1980s, supply-side arguments did not fit contemporary conditions. During an interview on CNN on August 19, 2011, Bartlett stated that presidential candidate Rick Perry "is an idiot, and I don't think anybody would disagree with that." The comment was in reference to Perry's earlier assertion that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's actions would be "almost treasonous" if the Federal Reserve were to engage in expansionary monetary policy before the 2012 election in order to stimulate the economy. In a 2013 article for The American Conservative, Bartlett explained that after conducting research for the book, he "came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100 percent right in the 1930s", that "we needed Keynesian policies again", and that "no one has been