The Rescue Plan: What It Will and Won't Do

The government, O'Driscoll said, should have sought a higher return.

"I think we should have gotten 9 percent to start with," he said.

There is disagreement about whether the government will stand to lose or gain money through its bank investments.

Sanford Weill, the former chairman and CEO of Citigroup, was optimistic that the government would recoup its money and then some.

"The U.S. government borrows money at a rate of one or two percent and we'll be getting a minimum of five percent, so the taxpayer should be making an interest profit right from the beginning," Weill told "Good Morning America" on Tuesday.

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But Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said he expects at least some of the banks participating in the program won't survive – the money the government loses on those investments, he said, will soak up any potential returns.

"The intention is to lend money to hundreds of banks," he said. "Clearly some of them will go under."

There are also questions about how the new plan will affect the program originally proposed as part of the $700 billion rescue package: the heavily-criticized Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Under TARP, the government was to spend hundreds of billions to buy troubled assets – including mortgage-backed securities – from banks.

Neel Kashkari, the assistant Treasury secretary who is charged with overseeing the plan, said Monday that the department has created a policy team to work on a mortgage-backed securities purchase program.

But Baker said the government may choose not to move forward with TARP at all and instead spend more money on buying stakes in banks.

"Most economists really say it's an inefficient use of the government's money. Our interests here are in insuring that the banks are adequately capitalized and that's just not the most effective way to do it," he said.

Some worry that overall, the government's rescue effort will far exceed its initial $700 billion price tag: Barry Ritholtz, the author of "Bailout Nation: How Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy" and the CEO of the institutional research firm Fusion IQ, told ABCNews.com this week that the plan could eventually cost the government $2 trillion to $3 trillion.

William Poole, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said the amount the government is spending could eventually force higher taxes and cuts in federal spending.

"There was significant deficit going into this mess and now the federal government is adding hundreds upon hundreds of hundred of billions of dollars in outlays," he said. "That saddles the taxpayers with a permanent level of interest on that debt. ... The federal finances are going to be in a very fragile situation when all this is straightened out."