Why not just adjust the market cap by CPI? Remember these companies grow, get bigger, drive more revenues, yield more profit and own more assets - ownership interest in these companies becomes more intrinsically valuable over time. If your goal is to remove the impact of the change in purchasing power, we have a way of doing that - CPI.
CPI is a terribly gamed metric. Due to hedonic adjustment and poor weighting it’s not really clear it tracks well to anything. That is to say that the detailed level inputs are really good but the end product is manipulated.
The BLS actually publishes a CPI analysis based on a consistent series without adjustments called R-CPI-U-RS. The difference between CPI-U and R-CPI-U-RS is like 0.8% IIRC [1].
By all means, prove yourself wrong. You can dig up some old newspaper ads from the 70s. None of this is something you can't calculate at home.
> That is to say that the detailed level inputs are really good but the end product is manipulated.
All the details, data and weightings are published. Are there some you specifically disagree with?
Citation needed. And for the love of God don't cite Shadowstats lol, which is trivially and obviously wrong.