Rick Santorum coyly promised a group of Detroit business leaders Thursday that his plan to restore manufacturing and revive the economy was “just a little different” than those of the other candidates. The plan he then described was nothing more than a rehash of tired Republican ideas stretching back decades.

Name a tax, and he proposed to cut it: every income-tax rate, including, of course, that on the highest earners. The already low tax on capital gains. The tax on dividends. The corporate tax. And he would simply eliminate the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax.

Then, of course, come the spending cuts: $1 trillion a year for five years. He didn’t bother to list the hundreds of vital programs that would be devastated in the process. He had one easy prescription for any given safety-net program for the poor: “Cap it, cut it, freeze it, and block-grant it to the states.” And inevitably there was the call for far more domestic oil drilling.

But perhaps his most jarring assertion — especially in Michigan, which has suffered more than most from devastating unemployment — was that many people are deliberately staying out of the work force in order to luxuriate in their unemployment benefits.