For the first time in 27 years, the U.S. government is changing how it categorizes people by race and ethnicity, an effort that federal officials believe will more accurately count residents who identify as Hispanic and of Middle Eastern and North African heritage.
The revisions to the minimum categories on race and ethnicity, announced Thursday by the Office of Management and Budget, are the latest effort to label and define the people of the United States. This evolving process often reflects changes in social attitudes and immigration, as well as a wish for people in an increasingly diverse society to see themselves in the numbers produced by the federal government.
If you want to know where poverty is found in the US you can just ask the IRS. Effectively every adult is reporting their income and major property every year. Additionally, you could easily look at services for the marginal. How many empty beds are in the this particular homeless shelter, how many people in the area applied for food stamps, etc.
It really doesn’t matter that much. All you have to do is read a single bill that gets passed in Washington and it becomes clear that need of a population has no relationship with funding for that population.