I forget how much it was, and I feel like I may have posted it here in a comment before - but the amount of money that would be saved by eliminating the penny is like ELEVENTY-BAJILLION dollars.
Looking at it from that angle it's hard to disagree with it.

No one wants to have to round money to the nearest $0.05 increment though. Even though I know the rounding will average out, I still have a "I don't want to lose 4 cents!" running through my mind.

I think the penny is here to stay. We can't just start sniping the lowest value currency... how long would it be before we had people suggesting that we get rid of the nickel, then the dime, etc?

How would we save ELEVENTY-BAJILLION dollars? Just from the production of the penny? Or are there some sort of fancy economics numbers in there?

All I know is that if the penny is eliminated, I have a fancy plan in place. I'm drawing a cartoon of the plan and it will be tomorrow's blog post. A hint: 1) photo analysis of pennies on a conveyor belt.

Production.
Wikipedia says it costs 1.7c to make a penny.

Also:
"If it takes only two seconds extra for each transaction that uses a penny, the cost of time wasted in the U.S. is about $3.65 per person annually,[5] about $1 billion for all America.[6] Using a different calculation, economist Robert Whaples estimates a $300 million annual loss."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_debate_in_the_United_States

have you thought about taxes? I would think that taxes may go up..... because a nickel can't pay anything ending with 1-4 or 6-9..... So lets take a county tax rate of 8% and you bought something for $15, now considering pennies are removed we only have nickels.... being taxed at 8% on a $14 purchase means $1.12 will be added to the purchase making it cost $15.12 in results the nickel can't pay $15.12, so to make this work the government would decided to lower taxes to either 5% or 10% to make the nickel work which will most likely be raised to 10% and with that result making your purchase cost $15.40 and tada! The nickel can pay for that.

Taxes would be rounded to the nearest $0.05.
I saw something about this once, and the main negative was that people would feel like they were being cheated out of money when it rounded up - but it really would average out.

I just found out that there are several countries that have gotten rid of their lowest denomination coins.
New Zealand eliminated 1 and 2 cent coins in 1990, and then eliminated their 5 cent coins in 2006. Prices are rounded to the nearest 10 cents using "Swedish rounding".

The "Swedish rounding" for 10 cent increments is pretty straightforward (1-4c round down, 6-9c round up, and 5 is decided by the retailer), but for the 5 cent rounding it's a bit more odd:
1c, 2c, 6c, 7c round down
3c, 4c, 8c, 9c round up