Politics & Power Quote by Steve Buyer

"Kept faith" is doing the heavy lifting here: it frames veterans policy as a moral covenant, not a budget line. Steve Buyer isn’t just defending appropriations; he’s insulating the nation against the charge that it loves soldiers in rhetoric and abandons them in practice. The phrase borrows from civic religion, where betrayal isn’t a policy failure but a kind of sin.

Then comes the hard pivot to numbers. "Funding... is strong" is a confidence cue, and the 75 percent figure functions like a seal of legitimacy: measurable, dramatic, easy to repeat. It’s political jiu-jitsu - translating an emotionally loaded promise into a statistic that preempts skepticism. In an era when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq expanded the veteran population and the complexity of care (PTSD, traumatic brain injury, long-term disability), rising spending can be read two ways: proof of commitment, or proof of how much need has exploded. The quote quietly steers you to the first reading.

The subtext is also defensive. Politicians invoke veterans as a rare bipartisan shield; criticizing the claim risks sounding anti-veteran even when the critique is about wait times, bureaucracy, or whether the increases kept pace with demand and medical inflation. By defining "faith" as funding growth, Buyer narrows the battlefield to what government can count, not what veterans experience. It’s a familiar move in Washington: moral language up top, spreadsheet certainty underneath, and just enough uplift to suggest the story ends with redemption rather than a backlog.