Actually fees have been reduced at new 0.9 version, before they were 0.0001 now it is only 0.00001 if I remember correctly.

Transaction Fees
----------------

This release drops the default fee required to relay transactions across the
network and for miners to consider the transaction in their blocks to
0.01mBTC per kilobyte.

Note that getting a transaction relayed across the network does NOT guarantee
that the transaction will be accepted by a miner; by default, miners fill
their blocks with 50 kilobytes of high-priority transactions, and then with
700 kilobytes of the highest-fee-per-kilobyte transactions.

The minimum relay/mining fee-per-kilobyte may be changed with the
minrelaytxfee option. Note that previous releases incorrectly used
the mintxfee setting to determine which low-priority transactions should
be considered for inclusion in blocks.

The wallet code still uses a default fee for low-priority transactions of
0.1mBTC per kilobyte. During periods of heavy transaction volume, even this
fee may not be enough to get transactions confirmed quickly; the mintxfee
option may be used to override the default.