Household income change - assumed share spent?

After finding more information throughout the Forum, I would like to refine my question. I am trying to determine the assumed savings and personal tax rates by household income level for Los Angeles County using the 2010 version of the model. For savings rates, I looked at a particular household income level column in the Social Accounting Matrix and divided the Capital row by the Commodity Total row. I am finding that only households in the highest category ($150k+) have a positive net savings rate (16%). For personal taxes, I looked at a particular household income level column in the Social Accounting Matrix and divided the sum of the Federal Government NonDefense and the State/Local Govt Noneducation rows by the Commodity Total row. I am finding a range of tax rates from slightly negative up to 31% at the highest income level. Are the methods I am using correct?

Hi Laurel, I apologize for the delay of my response. 1. This article: http://implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=664; will address your first question. 2. If so, is it possible to understand this by household income category when an activity includes multiple income categories? If this does not address your question, could you please elaborate? If you are trying to split the tax payments by Household Income Category you can use the tax values from the SAM to try to create splits of how much of the total impact was contributed by each Household. However, it might be faster to do the combine Household Income Change for your total results and then use individual Household Income Change Activities for each Household Income Category to determine what each Household contributes to the total. When people are running Household Income Change Activities but don't know which HH income group to use for the Event (i.e., which HH income group will receive the new money) we often recommend either a) using the HH income category that matches your region's median income level or b) splitting up the funds amongst all 9 HH income groups based on the number of HHs in each group, which can be found under Explore > Study Area Data > View By: Demographics. Thanks!