I sort of hinted at this in passing in my first Ryan post, but Yglesias says it clearly:

[F]ocusing attention on the big-picture disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about long-term fiscal policy means we won't be focusing attention on what ought to be the most pressing economic policy issue of our time--mass unemployment and the tragic waste of human and economic potential it represents.

There's always the fact that politicians will try to conflate the two, but they are in fact very different things.