Paul Ryan: Another Democrat Like Obama? Our Best Days Are Behind Us

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan sat down with CNBC's John Harwood to discuss the 2016 election. He spoke about trade, entitlement programs, taxes, immigration and if Democrats take control of the White House in November.

JOHN HARWOOD: On taxes, when your predecessor as Ways and Means chair, Dave Camp, came out with a comprehensive tax reform a few years ago, he adopted as a principle that it was going to be distributionally neutral. It wasn't going to give an advantage to any group over the current system. Is that still a principle that you think is appropriate for the Republican tax agenda?

PAUL RYAN: So I do not like the idea of buying into these distributional tables. What you're talking about is what we call static distribution. It's a ridiculous notion. What it presumes is life in the economy is some fixed pie, and it's not going to change. And it's really up to government to redistribute the slices more equitably. That is not how the world works. That's now how life works. You can shrink or expand the economy, and what we want to maximize is economic growth and upward mobility so that everybody can get a bigger slice of the pie.

HARWOOD: And you're not worried that those blue-collar Republican voters, who are voting in the primaries right now, are going to say, "Hey, wait a minute. You're really taking care of people at the top more than you're taking care of me."

RYAN: I think most people don't think, "John's success comes at my expense." Or, "my success comes at your expense." People don't think like that. People want to know the deck is fair. Bernie Sanders talks about that stuff. That's not who we are.

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HARWOOD: So what do you do if a Democrat wins the presidency?

RYAN: Let me just finish my point. What I believe we do is we take an agenda to the country and say, "This is what we think we need to do to fix this country's big problems. This is how we prevent a debt crisis. This is how we grow the economy."

And then we let the country make a decision. And if we win the kind of election that we're hoping to win in 2016, not unlike what Ronald Reagan, and my mentor Jack Kemp did in 1980, then we will have earned a mandate from the country to put these things in place.

If, then, on your scenario, we have divided government, then we're just going to have to figure out how to make it work. But I think it's going to be more of the same. That's the frustration. What we're worried about is having more of the same, which is all these big problems that are facing our country that are piling up, they're still fixable.

If we have another presidency like this presidency, then I really do worry that the best days will be behind us, and that's the problem. If we have divided government, we're going to have to figure out how to make it work and it won't be nearly as good as if we have unified government to give us the ability to fix these problems.