IBO Director Ronnie Lowenstein (NY Times)

Mea Culpa! Apparently after all those years of a President who couldn’t think of a single mistake he’d made and corporate executives who couldn’t find a failure they wouldn’t reward, mea culpa’s are back.

Earlier this week New York City’s Independent Budget Office released it’s annual “how we would fix this screwy city budget if we could” report (Budget Options for New York City). It contained dozens of ideas for how the city could save hundreds of millions by changing some big and small things about the way the city does business.

One of those ideas involved cutting the city’s contribution to the pension plan for workers at “private cultural institutions” which sounded like a pretty good idea. After all why should the curator at the Met have a taxpayer-funded pension? The IBO estimated changing that policy would save about $25 million a year.

But they goofed. And Thursday they admitted it:

“In IBO’s ‘Budget Options for New York City’ released yesterday, we presented an option entitled Eliminate Pension Payments for Employees of Private Cultural Institutions (page 27). We estimated that this action would save $25 million annually. In fact, the Cultural Institutions Retirement System also includes employees of dozens of child care centers in the city. While the city’s payment to the Cultural Institutions Retirement System will be about $25 million this fiscal year, $17 million will be for the pensions of child care workers. That means the savings from eliminating the city’s pension contribution for cultural institution employees would be $8 million.”

Kudos to the IBO for fessing up and doing so pretty fast.

Plus even $8 million bucks is something. Mayor B? Whaddya think?

Oh, and one more. MSNBC host Keith Olbermann did his own mea culpa too. This one over his gleeful reporting about that the boss of arch-rival Fox News allegedly told analysts on a conference call earlier in the week.

The original transcript showed News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch saying his has ”never been a company that tolerates facts.” That of course was too delicious for Olbermann to pass up. Unfortunately it turned out the transcript was wrong.

To his credit Olbermann admitted he’d screwed up — or at least that the transcript company had screwed up and he’d repeated their error.

Hey. It’s something.