>>>"Sometimes, there are NO capital gains. Go back to 1966 and you find that owning stocks REDUCED the 30-year surviving withdrawal rate compared to owning commercial paper alone.   Total return investors gloss over this point. When valuations are high, quite often there are capital losses to overcome, not capital gains to harvest.   Have fun."<<

No, you've missed the point.  Total return is the sum of distributions and fund or portfolio appreciation. Portfolio diversification doesn't obviate periodic rebalancing. If there are no capital gains or even temporary  paper losses, maximizing total returns just becomes less different from income investing.    If one is going to freeze h/her portfolio for all of retirement, choosing only the currently highest yielding securities or safest commercial paper would still not be my first choice.   

I can find find times when owning only fixed income also reduced the survival withdrawal rate, but I can't find a thirty year period when owning only one or the other made best sense.