It's not every day that you can laugh in the face of someone who says, "well 19 cents is better than nothing" when you're talking about gas prices dropping. But, I did just that when I heard that that's exactly what just happened in the U.S.

Why is that laughable? Because gas over 4-bucks is, frankly, laughable. At least for us here in Iowa. In California, that's a steal. But for a state whose residents are used to paying little more than 3-dollars a gallon when gas is way up, paying around $4.50 is, again, laughable.

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KCRG is reporting on the lower gas prices, using the Lundberg Survey of gasoline prices as a metric. Closer to home, the app/website Gas Buddy confirms prices are... lower with some in Cedar Rapids paying around $4.10-$4.12 a gallon on the lower end.

Waterloo meanwhile, is still much higher with an average of around $4.32 a gallon as of this writing, according to Gas Buddy users. Still, this is lower than in recent previous weeks. The lowest prices in Iowa are in Davenport, where the lowest is $4.03 a gallon.

Despite this... nice? little cost drop, we're still roughly $1.66 higher than this time in 2021. We're also still over $4 a gallon and, many of us are back to pre-COVID driving trends.

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So what's next? Will we see prices continue to drop, or will we see yet another gas cost uptick in the coming days and weeks? The KCRG report says... another drop should be coming. In fact, citing the Lundberg Survey, we should see another 10-20 cent cost drop very soon.

If that is indeed the case, many Iowans will again be paying under 4-dollars a gallon. It's not much relief, but at this point, it's certainly something. Here's hoping we get (well) below 3-dollars a gallon soon.

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

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