This issue resolves itself. Miners will refuse to uptake transactions into blocks that pay insufficient fees. There's no need to arbitrarily force $80+ transaction fees.

As a review for anyone reading, miners are compensated via the block reward - a direct grant of Bitcoin to the miner - as well as transaction fees for any transactions they decide to include in their block. (The person who mines the block gets to unilaterally decide which transactions go in the block; functionally this means they just sort in descending order of $/kb and include as many as they can)