Some Old Pics

I recently revived the programs used to do fun stuff on my cell phone (like make ringtones, movies and download pictures). I came across some fun pictures and thought I should share some. The technology we have at our fingeertips is amazing.

We were in the MUSS last year and had a ton of fun eating free food and hanging out in the student section. It was always fun to take Maggie. We always dressed her in sparkly red pants. She is so cute. This was taken about one year ago.

Last year on Thanksgiving we did some Hinckley Family Portraits because we hadn't done them since before Chelsea's mission in 2001. Since those pictures we'd had 6 wonderful additions to the family through marriage and birth. Now with the twins the Wayne Hinckley family has doubled to 16. Here's a picture of the women folk:

When Megan and I were dating we used to joke about how things would be when we ruled the world, so we thought we'd better train Maggie on that too:
I think she liked it.

After pictures we had our Thanksgiving Feast at my mom's house. Maggie and I were excited:
And then later we looked through the ads to see if we could get and super sweet deals in the morning sales:
We didn't get anything much beyond a remote controlled helicopter and some hand tools.

Maggie used to play with a small magnetic necklace. She stunned us the Sunday after Thanksgiving when she put it on her head like a crown. It was so cute that I had to take a picture, even though we were in church, but the meeting hadn't started yet, so I was OK, right?

Megan was in the early stages of twin pregnancy at this time. We didn't know it was twins, but faces like this should have led us on to it.

Near the end of January we had to take our Honda to get inspected and had the brakes and oil changed and had a transmission flush on the Corolla. I didn't think it would take long, so I had Maggie with me at the car place while we waited. They seemed to take forever with the car and in the mean time Maggie was getting tired of sitting around. She started climbing all over stuff and getting in to junk. While she was doing something she slipped and banged her poor mouth on a chair. She was crying hard and I could see some blood on her lips. She wouldn't let me look at her closely to see if she was going to be OK or if she was going to lose a tooth. The only way I could see her mouth was to tell her to smile and take a picture. This was back in the day of Maggie's cheesy grins. Luckily it looked like she was going to be ok.
Maggie loves playing with her cousins. This was taken at the end of April:

Megan and I took Maggie with us to celebrate our third anniversary in May. We went to dinner and then went to test drive a new car that we thought we wanted. Maggie was really helpful in making sure the tires were properly inflated:

These are some more cousins having fun taken on May 14.

About 10 days before the twins came, Megs and I were chillin and so what do we do when we are bored? I whipped out the camera phone and we had an ANTM photo shoot:




She started getting angry there near the end. Being pregnant with twins can slighlty increase volatility and appetite.

Here are the boys on the day that we brought them home:
Maggie loves to play with them and tries to be like them at times:
Sometimes I take pictures of myself on accident. I don't know why all the accidental pics have such strange facial expressions and crazy hair. We've become accustomed to blaming it on the lack of sleep. Megan told me today though that the trick is to convince yourself that you don't need much sleep. That way you won't feel sleep deprived.

And finally, we went to the Utah football game against CSU a few weeks ago. Megan and I sat by ourselves in the Asian Student Section of the MUSS. It was fun! The reason why going to a Utah game at Rice Eccles is so memorable is because where else in Utah will you see this:

It's hard to see, but there was a guy that was wearing nothing but shoes and a speedo walking around the student section, posing for pictures with any stranger that wanted to. What a great sense of team spirit and fan dedication. It was awesome!

I recently heard an anonymous discussion regarding income taxes. Because I intend to be incredulously rich someday, I decided to do some research to uncover based on the current 2007 tax schedules, at what point will my taxes exceed 50% of my income. This has been a hot topic in the recent election.

I first researched the federal and state income tax rate schedules. I found the federal rates in the 2007 instruction booklet to the form 1040. By the way I have the instruction booklet (all 155 pages) because I did our own taxes by hand earlier this year and it was really cool! Way more awesome than the tax programs. The booklet can be downloaded at irs.org.

I then found the state tax brackets on the state website (http://incometax.utah.gov/rates.php).

After glancing at the information shown in those tables, before any calculations were done, I quickly observed that one would have to be in the highest bracket (over $350,000) to come even close to paying 50% of your income.

I did some quick calcs and observed that the amount of taxed income obviously converges on the percentages of 35% Federal + 6.98% State = 42% total.

I then remembered that I was omitting Social security and medicaid. So i found those rates at this website: http://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/colafacts.htm. The website gives 2009 rates in which Medicaid has remained a constant 1.45% and Social Security is increased to 7.65% for employees and 13.85% for the self employed, of the first $102,000 only. Based on my work experience, if I intend to be so ridiculously rich I'm going to have to be self employed.

After adding those additional taxes I came up with the following graph:

As can be seen in the graph, based on Married, Filing Jointly status, even with zero deductions, it is impossible to pay over 50% of your income to taxes if the taxes to which you are referring include Federal, State, Medicaid and Social Security. The graph will once again converge at 35% Federal + 6.98% State + 1.45% Medicaid = 43.43% total

I'll be honest: I don't know if I will ever make over $1,000,000 per year, so I cut the table down to the first million as shown below. Interesting how the burden really levels out.
I don't know how to end this post. I think taxes are cool. I mean, it's hard paying for them, but we have a lot of benefits and protection as a result of them. I guess that's why their always automatically deducted and most people just never think of them. Awesome.