This week, Speaker Ryan sat down with MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt for a conversation about the need for historic tax reform. Watch the interview here and here, and check out excerpts below.

Speaker Ryan: “The train is on the tracks, and we’re moving. The whole purpose of this timeline is to get law this year, 2017, so Americans wake up in 2018 with a new tax system that is wired for growth, that gives middle income people a real break on their taxes and dramatically simplifies the system, to get rid of loopholes so this code’s fairer, and allowing people to actually file their taxes. Nine out of ten people file their taxes on a postcard. That kind of dramatic simplification is really good for families, people living paycheck to paycheck, economic growth. And then on the business side, we are really hitting our businesses in such a way with a bad tax code, that it puts them at a huge competitive disadvantage. You get the business code fixed by lowering their rates, so they’re on par with the rest of the world or better, we will have much faster economic growth. We’ll have more jobs, higher wages, that’s the goal of tax reform. And the reason we want to get it done this year is so we have a really good 2018 so that people can go back to work, wages can go up, that’s the hope.”

The two also discussed the tax code, and in particular how it relates to “the best guy out there,” Aaron Rodgers.

Speaker Ryan: “We don’t want to have a tax law that says Aaron Rodgers who gets his salary from the Green Bay Packers, salary income from the Green Bay Packers that’s guaranteed, you know, contract income, taxed at 39.6 and then let him turn it into an LLC, Aaron Rodgers LLC and be at 25. That’s not what we’re interested in doing here. But if you’re talking about the actual passthrough Subchapter S corporation that’s out in an industrial park in Elkhorn, Wisconsin with 50 employees competing against Canada taxed at 15 percent and they’re up above 40 percent yet we’re going to lower their tax rate so they can be competitive. So the question here is, how do have the right rules and definitions of income so that Aaron Rodgers—like I said, he’s the best guy out there—so that he can’t, all of a sudden, shelter his income from the regular tax rate that he ought to have applied to him.”