first of all you can never say how long a transaction would take to confirm if you pay a lower fee, that is only an estimation. and also reporting fees in dollar terms has no meaning. fees should be reported in bitcoin (or satoshi) per size (in bytes or kilobytes whichever you prefer) because you are not paying fee based on your amount, but based on the size of your transaction.
for example right now fees are about 2-5 satoshi per byte so i can make a transaction with that much fee but pay a total of $0.02 or $10 depending on the size of my transaction.

secondly for the past 9 years that bitcoin has been around fees were only high for a couple of months for a couple of reasons including some spam attacks against bitcoin network.