Good question.
The government can create jobs, but the nature of those jobs is non-renewable as they are not supported by free-market dynamics in which the authenticity of demand meets the authenticity of supply. Hence those jobs are highly temporal, and in many cases yield questionable evolutionary value to a renewable democracy. Nevertheless, most of our marketplaces are oligarchically controlled, even in the private sector, and artificial manipulation of job creation without relevancy to producing renewable value to the evolution of humanity is commonplace. Hence many private-sector jobs are non-renewable with not necessarily a better track record than those “created” by the government. High unemployment is a direct result of the inevitable sub-priming of any marketplace in violation of freedom.
Why we should blame the government, but in a democracy in all fairness ourselves, is that the government should be held accountable for not having created systems (used in the public and private sector) that perpetuate free-market dynamics. Such is the preeminent role and duty of government. Not to mingle in the marketplace, but to ensure whatever marketplaces exist operate in compliance with free-market principles.
Meaning, our government has failed to create and implement the framework that holds marketplaces to the paradoxical rules of a free-market, before those marketplaces are allowed to operate. Kind of like deciding to play a game of soccer in which nobody understands and is beholden to the rules of soccer. Soccer should not be the expected outcome of an absence of the rules of soccer if you catch my drift.
So, in the absence of the paradoxical rules of freedom imposed on marketplaces our government simply “wings it” with a myriad of consequential job creation efforts detached from a plausible cause, to finagle and promote an outcome to mimic and spur on a freer-market, the results however held captive by the fallacy of a lack of pre-established free-market principles and thus non-renewable and at a considerable cost (if not burden) to society in pursuit of freedom.