While the US economy has performed far better than its counterparts in the Western world, official statistics tend to paint a rosier picture of labor markets than reality. In this edition of Smart Talk, Dr. Jack Rasmus, Professor of Economics at St. Mary College argues that many of the statistics on unemployment and inflation are cherry picked by policy makers and the media in order to boost consumer and business sentiment. Dr. Rasmus also discusses inflation which he attributes mainly to price gouging, enabled by monopolistic tendencies in some sectors of the economy.