The return of Elian Gonzalez to the Museum of Communism Formerly Known as Cuba might give the Big Three news magazines something newsy to write about next week. Meanwhile, Newsweek spent this week busting some treasured myths about Social Security, and Business Week tried to explain why gas prices are so high.

Newsweek's "Social Security Crack Up" is a package that smartly cuts through what writer Allan Sloan calls the "miasma of myths, misinformation and mystery" of Social Security, the reform of which promises to be a major campaign issue in the fall.

Sloan says the inner workings of our cherished social welfare program for old folks -- a.k.a. our financially wobbly and no longer sacred national Ponzi scheme of intergenerational wealth transfer -- have been deliberately obscured by politicians for decades.

Many Americans have been too brainwashed to accept what honest economists and brave politicians have been saying about Social Security since 1935 and what Sloan says so plainly in Newsweek.

"The biggest obstacle to understanding Social Security," Sloan says, "is the myth of the Social Security trust fund. The fund's byzantine workings and weird accounting have helped create decades of confusion about what Social Security is, and how sound (or unsound) its finances are."

Sloan's piece and the accompanying articles do a decent job of discrediting the political, demographic and actuarial premises of the $400-billion-a-year program he says soon "threatens to devour the federal budget."

Sloan is not much of a fan of either Al Gore's or George W. Bush's baby-step, fuzzily defined Social Security reforms. He is tougher on Gore's "Retirement Savings Plus" plan, saying it is "more disingenuous than Bush's, because Gore is promising the moon and the stars and using smoke-and-mirrors accounting to 'pay' for it." In other words, Social Security trickery as usual.

(For a discussion of the different ways Gore and Bush say they would spend the "extra" $1 trillion surplus that accountants now say the federal government will collect/steal in taxes over the next decade, see the Economist. Hint: Giving the money back to the people who'll have it lifted from their wallets doesn't seem to be an option.)

Sloan's own ideas for reforms are as disappointingly tame as Bush's and Gore's. In an otherwise valuable piece that blows the whistle on the myths and deliberate deceptions of the New Deal's most important social program, he -- and Newsweek's editors -- commit one glaring mistake:

Nowhere do they mention that other countries around the world already have successfully privatized all or part of their social security systems without creating angry mobs of starving senior citizens.

Chile did it 20 years ago. Eight other Latin American countries are preparing to do the same. It would have been nice to tell Newsweek's readers how those nations are doing and explain why their people were able to do what Americans can't do.

Supply side gasonomics
And what about the other big issue of this presidential year -- high gasoline prices. Why is gas in Chicago $2.30 a gallon? Why is the national average $1.60, up from 98 cents 18 months ago? Business Week asks "Who's to Blame?" and comes to a slightly fishy answer: everybody.

OPEC. Refiners. Speculators. Broken gasoline transmission lines in the Midwest. Regulators who have made oil companies put all kinds of additives into gas to make it burn cleaner in the summer.

And don't forget ever-greedy oil companies, evil sport-utility vehicle drivers, the gyrations of increasingly volatile oil markets and the continuing inability of human beings to foresee the future.

All of the above play a part, Business Week says, oddly unwilling to pin the main blame on what its own graphic clearly shows is the primary culprit: a nearly 300 percent increase in crude oil prices charged by OPEC.

A gallon of gas that now costs an average of $1.62 includes 71 cents for crude oil, up from just 23 cents per gallon in January 1998. Refining costs are 33 cents, up from 24; distribution and marketing costs are 16 cents, up from 10; and taxes are 42 cents, up from 41. For those who believe those evil oil companies are engaged in another round of price gouging, Biz Week should have clearly spelled out how many pennies of profit the companies make per gallon of gas, but it didn't.

Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report's take on the cause of high gas prices is not so complicated and more to the point, even if the headline -- "Pump and Circumstance" -- is forced and silly:

"The FTC has previously found that sudden gasoline price hikes have more to do with the law of supply and demand than collusion. Oil industry observers say the jumps aren't surprising, considering that crude oil's price surpassed $30 a barrel early this year -- more than double the price of a year ago."

Quick Reads
If you agree with the progressives at Nation magazine that putting people to death is not something the state or anyone else should be doing. Or think the state is not competent to be given such a responsibility. Or simply believe that capital punishment constitutes cruel and inhuman punishment and ought to be ended, check out The Nation's website.

It puts the Internet to good use with its "Death Row Roll Call," which is a constantly updated calendar that includes the names of inmates scheduled for execution around the country. Details of their crimes are conveniently absent. But you can click on a name of your favorite actual or alleged killer and send an e-mail to his/her state's governor requesting a stay on this execution and a moratorium on all executions in the state.

Artwork of Al Gore adorns the covers of both the July Atlantic Monthly (not yet online) and the July 3 New Republic, and Atlantic's artistry is not too flattering. Its illustrated portrait of Gore shows him subtly baring a dangerous-looking canine and is accompanied by the cover line, "An Acquired Taste."

The Atlantic's portrait nicely complements the article by James Fallows, the former U.S. News & World Report editor who says Gore may look stiff as an oak on camera, but he is a very good debater. He has a good career record (only one loss to Quayle) because he does his homework and because he isn't afraid to lie, annoy or offend his opponents if that what it takes to win a debate.

Meanwhile, the New Republic, whose editor-in-chief/chairman Martin Peretz wants Al Gore to win the White House almost as desperately as Forbes magazine publisher Steve Forbes wanted himself to win, offers candidate Gore two bits of insiders-only campaign advice.

The cover art shows a devil on one of Gore's broad shoulders telling him to be negative while an angel on the other shoulder whispers "Be boring." The devil, associate editor Jonathan Chiat, says the decision by the Gore campaign to abandon negativity "is a concession to laziness and deep intellectual confusion." He says negativity lets Gore hide his natural weaknesses and addresses the "structural weaknesses of running as a sitting vice president."

The angel, senior editor Michell Cottle, tells Gore's handlers to let their candidate be his natural self -- boring and stiff as a four-by-four. By emphasizing his dullness, his moral rectitude, his tediously responsible nature, she says, he'll appear as un-Clintonlike as possible. That way, the thinking goes, Gore will appeal to the many Democrats who, secretly, are as embarrassed as the rest of the country about the current character-challenged occupant of the Oval Office.