Some good news!

This week the Energy Information Administration released final oil import numbers for 2013. Thanks to advances in domestic production and greater efficiency, Americans managed to decrease total oil imports by 360 million barrels to 3.5 billion barrels in 2013, down from a total of 3.9 billion barrels in 2012.

Guess what that means? We spent $50 billion less on imported oil in 2013 than we did in 2012. Last year’s total tab for imported oil was $384 billion. That’s right. Compare that to 2012 when we spent $434 billion on imported oil. We keep more of our energy dollars here at home instead of spending them overseas.

Now the bad news. Spending $384 billion on imported oil is nothing to brag about. To put that figure in perspective, $384 billion is roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. trade deficit. And it’s more than half our national defense budget (which, as we all know, is spent to a large degree on securing access to foreign oil).