Joe Biden wants to combat climate change, repair the country’s crumbling infrastructure, improve education and expand government-financed health care.

To finance that ambitious agenda, the Democratic presidential candidate plans to raise taxes by about $4 trillion over a decade through levies on corporations and high-income households.

Easier-to-adopt policies include raising the corporate tax rate from 21%, reversing the 2017 tax cuts on individual income above $400,000 and increasing estate taxes. The more a tax increase falls on corporations or the very rich, the more Democrats embrace it. Those changes could raise more than $1.5 trillion.

But some of Mr. Biden’s tax increases on specific industries could be tougher to get through Congress. Those include imposing a financial-transactions tax and repealing a provision that allows real-estate investors to avoid capital-gains taxes by quickly reinvesting proceeds of a transaction. And some lawmakers may want to wait until the recovery is on surer footing before imposing tax increases that could slow it down.

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