$16 as the default transaction fee? Something fishy here. I know that the transaction fee is high nowadays, but I haven't heard anyone paying that much tx fee for a while. $16 is equivalent to BTC0.006, which is many times bigger than the highest transaction fee I have ever paid (BTC0.001).
Nothing fishy about this at all, fees can easily be $50 or more these days depending on the size of the transaction.
The OP said he made $40 from 2 days of earnings so this would suggest to me that he was most likely using faucets which do not much more than good but fill your wallet with "dust" transactions (many small inputs)
This is actually a good lesson to learn for the OP and one that i experienced myself a few years ago. Hopefully he will now research bitcoin transactions a little more and learn that the miners fee has nothing to do with the amount being transacted but the size of the transaction itself.