What you are about to read seems ripped straight out of “Ripley’s Believe it or Not”. As we shared recently, the economy is currently chugging along at a pace far ahead of what economists predicted for this fiscal year (but is matching the figures predicted by SmallBusiness.com). But even we find the following news hard to believe.

One thing we are sure of, though: There are a parade of economists willing to explain why a lower deficit and not being dependent on OPEC are bad things. Some economists will say anything to make it onto CNBC or be quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

Ignore the naysayers. These are good things.

1. The United States has become a major world oil exporter, a return to a status that helped make the country a great power in the first half of the 20th century.

(quote via NYTimes.com)

“Domestic oil production has rocketed by roughly 70 percent over the last six years to 8.7 million barrels a day, and imports from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have already been cut roughly by half. With domestic oil production growing month after month, many oil experts predict that the country’s output will rise to as much as 12 million barrels a day over the next decade, which would mean the country will be swimming in oil the way it is currently dealing with a surplus of natural gas.”

2. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the just-completed 2014 fiscal-year federal budget had the smallest deficit recorded since 2008.

(quote via NBCNews.com)

“Relative to the size of the economy, (the 2014 federal) deficit–at an estimated 2.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)–was slightly below the average experienced over the past 40 years, and 2014 was the fifth consecutive year in which the deficit declined as a percentage of GDP since peaking at 9.8 percent in 2009.”