$olution: $ell the Golden $tate

When I lived back East, a trip to the Jersey Shore meant you had to buy a beach tag for the privilege of putting your toes in the sand.

It’s time for California to wake up and start selling access to the coast, at least the parts of it that aren’t already owned by Dick Riordan, Eli Broad and David Geffen.

And while we’re at it, let’s sell branding rights to every piece of state property. You want to take the kids to Costco/Will Rogers State Beach?

It’ll cost you 10 bucks a head to wade in the surf.

And you can get to the beach by taking the Galpin Motors/Santa Monica Freeway west, then heading north on the DreamWorks SKG/Pacific Coast Highway.

Radical ideas, yes. But that’s exactly what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked for in his State of the State address. And it’s not as if he didn’t raise fees himself, for everything from state parks to college tuition.

The governor’s budget, by the way, which he released Friday, is a sham.

New taxes are called fees. A $2-billion hit to schools is not a cut, but a “re-basing.” And we’re still expected to believe that the governor’s proposed $15-billion bond measure, plus interest, is not a tax.

The very structural problem that helped dig a hole -- too much reliance on sales and income tax and not enough on property tax -- has not been touched.

Cities have now been dunned, rescued and dunned again by Schwarz-Reneger, this time to the tune of $1.3 billion.

I saw that one coming. I was at a Los Angeles City Council meeting when practically every council member stood up to make a fawning speech thanking Schwarzenegger for restoring cuts from the rollback of the vehicle license fee increase.

“What fools,” I whispered to a companion. Any dope could have predicted that whatever money Schwarzenegger stuffed into one pocket, he’d grab from another.

Sure, we were due for an end to the Gray Davis days of free spending in California. In the current climate, we could get two-thirds popular support for turning state government over to Wal-Mart.

But why can’t we also raise a few bucks while we’re swinging that ax? California, after all, is in the middle of the pack in state and local taxation, and we’ve got personal wealth like nobody’s business.

The state has 95 of the country’s 400 billionaires, and their net worth is $102.9 billion, according to figures sent to me by Bill Wong, chief of staff to Assemblywoman Judy Chu. It’d be chump change for them to loan us the $15 billion, interest-free.

In 2000, according to Wong’s numbers, 784 Californians with incomes above $200,000 paid no income tax at all. What’s the point of having an action hero as governor if he isn’t going to track those people down, put them in headlocks and grab their wallets?

Two professors -- John Bachar of Cal State Long Beach and Paul O’Lague of UCLA -- sent me a proposal that would raise enough money in two years to wipe out all our bills, and it wouldn’t cost 97.3% of Californians a nickel.

Roughly 400,000 Californians make more than $200,000 annually, the bean-counting profs argue, and by raising their income taxes on a sliding scale of 0.5% to 7%, we’d rake in about $13 billion a year.

“Instead of purchasing a mansion for $10 million,” the professors wrote of the top tier, “they’d have to settle for a fixer-upper for about $9.5 million.” How about getting that idea on the March ballot? The governor said we all had to pitch in to make California great again, so why are the middle class and working poor taking the hit while the state aristocracy banks the savings from a fat federal tax cut?

Actually, never mind. Taxing the rich is too obvious. We’re better off tossing excess baggage overboard and selling whatever we can.

Do we really need any of the territory north of Sacramento or southeast of Riverside?

Let’s sell Silicon Valley to Bill Gates, if he doesn’t already own it, and get the NRA to sponsor the LAPD.

Let’s sell publicly owned UC Berkeley to private Stanford, UCLA to USC, and the Rose Bowl to the BCS.

If we’re going to lop the working poor off the Medi-Cal rolls, and leave emotionally disturbed children, the addled and the lame to fend for themselves, do we need state offices in every locale?

I opened the Los Angeles phone book to call a state office and found two solid pages of listings. One in particular stood out.

Look, we don’t need a lieutenant governor’s office in Sacramento, let alone Los Angeles. If Cruz Bustamante didn’t show up for work, would anyone notice?

While we’re downsizing, I say we give Catalina back to the Wrigleys. Let’s sell Bakersfield to Billy Bob Thornton and Laguna Beach to Warren Buffett.

Send me your budget-balancing ideas, folks, and I’ll put the best ones -- if not the worst -- in the newspaper. And remember, the more radical the better.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at steve.lopez@latimes.com. Read additional columns at latimes.com/lopez.