It’s probably not the first time you’ve heard it: The future prosperity of America rides on what measures Congress takes to reduce the federal deficit.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) harped on this sentiment March 5 in Leesburg, where he spoke to workers at the headquarters of K2M, an international medical device company.

Warner, a former governor of Virginia, will become the commonwealth’s senior Senator next year when Sen. Jim Webb, a Democrat, retires.

“I’m obsessed about the issue of whether our country is going to come to grips with the $15 trillion in debt that we have,” Warner said early in his talk.

There’s no “Democrat- or Republican-only” answer to the debt and deficit, he exclaimed.

Known as the Democratic leader of the “Gang of Six”—a bipartisan group of Senators working on solutions for the national debt crisis—Warner said he’s been “extraordinarily frustrated” in the three years he’s been in the U.S. Senate.

The former venture capitalist millionaire went from being Virginia’s governor to being the “junior Senator in an institution that 92 percent of Americans think is totally dysfunctional.”

“And I’m part of the 92 percent,” Warner said.

“Both parties have got plenty of unclean hands” when it comes to the national deficit, he said. He commented that the United States has annually run a deficit for nearly seven decades, with few exceptions.

Social Security, which has been largely hamstrung because citizens are living longer than they were a century ago, has been a primary cause of the staggering debt, said Warner.

“When Roosevelt set Social Security at 65, that was in 1934, average life expectancy was 62 … When I was a kid, there was 16 people working for every one person on Social Security; today there are three people working for every one person.”

Everything, including entitlement and defense spending, must be “on the table” to reduce the debt, he voiced.

“I was embarrassed to be in the Senate last July and August, when we came close to this debt [ceiling] debacle, and this insanity that went on …,” he said.

While the politicians deserve most of the blame, leaders in the business community need to be more vocal in demanding their Senators and representatives work together.

“As a guy who’s a business guy longer than a politician, I was so frustrated and angry with the American business community,” he said.

The 80-minute discussion touched on education, the voting age, immigration and energy policies. Warner said he’s for an “all of the above” energy policy, meaning offshore drilling, wind and solar energy, and finding other alternative energy sources.

Immigration policies in the U.S. must ensure young bright minds aren’t returning to their home countries after being trained at America’s top universities, said Warner.

On education, there must be a stronger focus on math and sciences and secondary education, including technical colleges.

Job growth, he says, has come predominately from start-up companies – such as K2M – in the past two decades, noting that Fortune 500 companies on average have lost employment on a national basis.

Warner talked about his personal experience investing in Nextel when he was in his 20s. Though he graduated from Harvard Law School, he never practiced, something for which he often caught grief from his friends.

“They said to me, ‘Warner, you are so crazy. Go get a real job. Who is ever going to want a car telephone?’” Warner recalled.