Examining Welfare Use by Household. A large body of prior research has examined welfare use and the fiscal impact of immigrants by looking at households because it makes the most sense. Perhaps the largest study of its kind was done by the National Research Council in 1997. The NRC did a household-level analysis in their fiscal estimates because "the household is the primary unit through which public services are consumed." 17 In their fiscal study of New Jersey, Deborah Garvey and Thomas Espenshade also used households as the unit of analysis because "households come closer to approximating a functioning socioeconomic unit of mutual exchange and support." 18 Other analyses of welfare use and programs, including by the . Census Bureau, have also used the household as the basis for studying welfare use. 19 The late Julian Simon of the Cato Institute, himself a strong immigration advocate, also argued that it did not make sense to examine individuals when looking at the fiscal impact of immigrants. 20 In addition, some of the welfare use variables in the SIPP are reported at the household level, not the individual level.
GDP is simply a measure of the total of finished goods and services produced in the monetized segment of the economy valued on the basis of cost, regardless of its relative importance or benefit to human well-being, and without making any distinction between productive and destructive, essential and trivial, sustainable and unsustainable activities. Thus, earthquakes, hurricanes, rising crime and divorce rates, increasing levels and costs of litigation, proliferation of hand guns, increasing incidence of epidemic diseases, increasing consumption of sedatives and saturated fats, subprime mortgages and unsustainable credit card debt, chemical pollution, depletion of non-renewable resources, military spending and all-out war are indistinguishable by this measure from rising levels of employment, education, public health and safety, cleaner air and water, better housing and nutrition and retirement security. GDP is simply a gross measure of total output, market activity, money changing hands.