> I feel like I must be missing something. Why are dividends treated differently from price increases?

you're thinking about it the right way, and they aren't treated differently the way you're thinking. They way they are treated differently is,

if you just look at historical stock prices you will miss the dividends being siphoned off, so you have to track the dividends and put those amounts back into your charts, and it's mentioned over and over so you don't look at the data and wonder if they did the naive thing or the complex thing.

and dividends are taxed in that calendar year as income at the corporate level, and again at the personal level, and not with lower capital gains tax rates, so the amount left over that is available to the investor to spend or reinvest is smaller than the nominal amount, and taxes change over time, and different income brackets pay different taxes (which is ignored, i think, they just use worst case marginal tax rates) Because dividends are income-taxed, it makes sense to earmark that money to spend on yourself if you're going to be spending any of the money on yourself.

and large "institutions" frequently don't pay income tax (I'm not an expert, but churches, foundations, and perhaps pension funds and corporations which have large losses/expenses/depreciation to write off) but they do play a large role in the investment markets, driving market prices etc.

You know what it all reminds me of? climate science. You can measure a ton of metrics and track them over time and try to predict the future, but the data is only a very rough estimate of what's going on, and the underlying dynamics change a lot over time.

The tax situation also obviously depends on the investors' tax residence. For example in Switzerland, private investors don't have to pay taxes on capital gains. And many countries have a flat tax for dividends and don't consider them income. But then dividends are often additionally taxed at the source, even though you can reclaim it in some cases.

a dividend is a payout of the companies earnings. rather, the portion the company has chosen not to spend on itself. That amount is divide up by how much % you own in the company. If you owned 50% of all the stock, you would directly receive 50% of their profits less re-investing come dividend time

the stock price is how much people are willing to pay for purchase said stock.(consider market share when looking at price, because 2 stocks at $5.2 is the same thing as 1 stock at $10.5)

so yes, from your gains perspective it is the same thing but the source of where the increase in your portfolio is entirely different

> dividends plus inflation

Just to make sure I am following correctly, is this referring to the process which:

corporations have had their costs go up roughly 2% per year since 1928, so they have raised their prices roughly 2% per year, making it so that cost increases (labor/good/services/whatever) are "passthroughs" (assuming margins stay the same), passing along increases to customers (who have roughly had their pay increase 2% per year)

and because of this, corporations have stayed profitable (more profitable in dollars, "the same" profitable in percentage given margins/inflation?), and share prices have grown?