What's in a stimulus package?

The House passed the highly controversial $819 billion economic stimulus bill on Wednesday. Not a single Republican voted for the measure and even 11 Democrats opposed the legislation, which has been criticized for its huge price tag. The House had rejected a Republican-backed amendment to scale back the bill's spending and expand its tax cuts.

But the Senate version of the bill is actually even more expensive, ringing in at around $900 billion.

Let's take a brief look at some of the most important parts of the bill:

1) The Senate version of the bill includes a $69 billion proposal to shield millions of middle class Americans from the Alternative Minimum Tax.This proposal is meant to sweeten the deal for Republicans and has been adamantly pushed by Iowa Senator Charles Grassley. AMT was originally intended to prevent high-income taxpayers from using loopholes to avoid paying taxes all together... and thus to make sure they pay a minimum tax. Unfortunately, when the AMT was cooked up 40 years ago, inflation wasn't considered, and now many middle class Americans are forced to pay higher taxes under its provisions. The House actually rejected adding a similar Republican amendment to expand the bill's tax cuts.

2) Both the Senate and the House versions of the bill allocate billions to create jobs across many industries. That includes $90 billion for construction projects, like repairing roads and bridges; $142 billion for education projects, like modernizing schools; and $54 billion for renewable energy projects, like updating the nation electric grid. Opponents of the spending say that many of these projects will take too long to implement, meaning the jobs they aim to create won't materialize anytime soon.

3) The bills also include huge chunks of cash for "safety net" programs that will help American weather the rest of the recession.These provisions include $43 billion for unemployment benefits and $20 billion for food stamps, school lunches, and similar food programs. Opponents say that, with the legislation getting more and more expensive, the focus should be on creating jobs, not on cushioning people from the economic downturn.

Though President Obama is aiming to gain broad support for the stimulus package, the clearly divided House vote doesn’t bode well. This is an incredibly complex piece of legislation… and darned expensive at that: any sort of broad consensus is going to be hard to come by. Still, some form of the bill is bound to pass before Obama's stated mid-February deadline because there is one thing nearly everyone can agree on: something has to be done to dig us out of this hole.

Ali Velshi is CNN's Chief Business Correspondent.