California has supposedly been on a downward slide to hell since sometime around the Summer of Love in 1966.

You know the drill.

This is the land of nut cases.

There are too many people.

Heavy industry has fled and taken their beloved smokestacks with them.

People are fleeing.

Corporations from Bank of America to Chevron and Tesla have moved their headquarters to greener pastures.

We have the most homeless, which makes sense because we have the most people.

There are too many immigrants, legal and otherwise.

It’s too expensive to live here.

The symptoms of our pending demise are endless and have been growing non-stop since the beginning of time.

What brings this up is the news a few days ago that data once again shows — if California was a freestanding nation — it would have the world’s fourth largest economy based on gross national product and other economic dashboard statistics.

Of course, this comes with the word “barely” added to it by the pundits and those in the vast hollowness of the Internet given California just edged Japan for the No. 4 bragging rights.

Forget they had overtaken California a few years ago and we have moved ahead of them based on comparing specific economic statistics.

That doesn’t fit the narrative.

California is always on a downhill slide.

Sacramento could find a way to slash taxes by 50 percent, issue every adult a $10,000 check each year, and have no deficit and California would still be sinking into the abyss.

The real problems are not our problems. We have plenty of them just like every other state and nation.

The problem is — to paraphrase Jack Nicholson’s character in “A Few Good Men”— most people can’t handle the truth.

Under Gavin Newsom’s watch during the past seven plus years, California’s GNP has grown 40 percent to $4.3 trillion.

Yeah, you might say, but what about taxes, what about the homeless, what about regulations?

What about them?

The problems we have — and that every state does in various degrees — hasn’t stopped economic growth as judged by world economic output statistics.

And if critics stopped body slamming California and looked at the per capita numbers, they might just have the courage to ask themselves if everything is so wrong how can so many things be so right?

No one said economic prosperity is spread evenly whether it is in California, Idaho, Texas, Florida or even China.

But California, which by far has the least amount of people among the top 10 economies in the world with 39.5 million residents, blows the doors off everyone else except China when it comes to per capita gross national product.

Start with the United States at No. 1 at $30 trillion. The USA overall has 342 million residents including Californians.

The Golden State is responsible for 14 percent of this nation’s GNP with 11.5 percent of the population.

No. 2 China has 1.404 billion people and a $20 trillion GNP that is close to being proportional to California on a per capita basis.

Germany, at No. 3, requires 50 percent more people (83.6 million) to generate 20 percent ($5.4 trillion) in output.

Japan, that we barely edged by a dozen or so millions of dollars, has three times our population at 122.4 million people.

India at No. 6, has 1.48 billion people and a GNP of $4.13 trillion.

And the United Kingdom comes in at No. 7 at $3.96 trillion but took 30.4 million more people (the UK has 69.6 million residents) to produce roughly 10 percent less than California.

Yes, California has a dearth of heavy industry.

But try to eat a washing machine and other durable goods.

California is by far the largest farm state in the nation accounting for 10.9 percent of output reaching $65.2 billion last year.

The Golden State is not only the No. 1 dairy state, which should silence California critics in Wisconsin, but 66 percent of all fruit and vegetables grown in the USA come from the state everyone acts like they can’t stomach, with the lion’s share of that from the San Joaquin Valley.

As for other attributes, let’s see Florida, Texas, or Idaho match our combination of mountains, deserts, varied coastline, valleys, lakes and even volcanoes.

California’s business climate is always under attack despite the numbers.

But there is one place detractors can’t say the climate is going to hell when it comes to the climate.

The climate change debate aside, California is one of seven regions on the planet you will find a coveted Mediterranean climate.

There is no question it can be expensive living in California with some parts more so than others.

But there are still 39.5 million people in California, almost 7.8 million people more than the second largest state, which is Texas.

Yet, there are more than a few that hear no good, see no good, or speak no good when it comes to California.