On Budget Black Holes

Now listen here. About all this business concerning "Budget black holes", can both sides of politics and all of the media just stop it? It's a bad, inaccurate metaphor which makes me all cross and shouty.

First of all, a black hole is not an absence. It is an enormously dense concentration of matter, creating a gravity well so intense the ordinary laws of physics don't apply. Not a "nothing," but profoundly and irretrievably a "something". The "blackness" is a property of the fact that it's so dense that not even light can escape.

A black hole is not, fundamentally, a "hole" in the traditional sense. Holes can be filled. Indeed, that is what each side of politics proposes to do with its opponent's (comparatively modest, really) "Budget black hole". If it really was a black hole though, you couldn't ever make it go away by throwing stuff at it. This could only add to its supermass. Indeed, "filling" a black hole would make it larger, denser and more inescapable.

Black holes also drag matter into themselves. Indeed, one assumes this is the appeal of the metaphor, for the charlatans who use it. It introduces a sense of urgency, as the black hole will surely only get deeper and blacker until it consumes us all in an apocalyptic melange of undead Sam Neill and Aerosmith nuking Bruce Willis.

But a Budget black hole doesn't do this. It's a mathematical puzzle with a finite solution. It's shortfall to be dealt with, now or later, by any number of compensating adjustments. The urgency of doing so depends on plenty of factors, most of which have nothing to do with its size. It is (if you really must) a hole. A gap, not an apocalypse. Not a black hole, just a hole.