Actually the exact opposite is what I have observed from my point of view.
As long as the amateur radio community is handing out Technician Class Licenses, and as long as repeater owners are linking their repeaters together to give those technicians someone to talk to, there is no reason to buy anything or upgrade their license, even to General.

Because 99% of the people licensed are not knowledgeable individuals, we have a group of know nothings that can't do anything and there is no one to Elmer them. So most people, not knowing any better, spends their money on a cheap Beofung or Whooshun handheld and they think that makes them a ham! Amateur radio was never designed to be cheap.
The cheap ham, the person that doesn't know anything about transceivers or antennas or power supplies or how feed lines works, are more inclined to not buy anything and just give their no traffic once a week on a local repeater net.

As long as you don't do anything, and you don't participate with a club, or a net such as ARES or RACES, or do public service work, or practice drills and scenarios of emergency / disaster type events, you won't ever produce the type of ham that is necessary in these types of events - to be communicators.

The blame clearly lies on the ARRL - since they do nothing to promote amateur radio, only themselves!
When is the last time you saw a television commercial on a national broadcast network promoting amateur radio?
When is the last time you saw a television program with a true relationship of someone that is an actual ham and what it is that we do or should do while on air.

The even bigger joke was the Television Show - Last Man Standing, where the star of the show is supposed to be a big time ham operator - yet never operates. There was all this media hype about how they were going to star amateur radio on the program and then when the time came, all they did was show an empty station that was left running 24 hours a day and a daughter that was not licensed that was talking on the air like a CB'r, that they went ahead anyways and tried to cover their tracks by saying that she too had an amateur radio license.. What a crock of ****!

You have to be a certain type of person to want to get an amateur radio license, and you have to want to be a ham to be willing to upgrade your license to General. Unless you have radio equipment at your disposal, you aren't going to be able to get on the air and talk. So just telling me that the girl did all of this, yet she had no antenna on her vehicle, she had no radio in her bedroom, and she had no license hanging on the wall, and she didn't know how to talk on the radio, not even to identify once every 10 minutes with her call.

All the show was - was a sham - that used ICOM and amateur radio one time to feed their plot. They might as well had used a CB radio and been done with it. It served no legitimate purpose in their house to be a ham, other then to use it - If All Else Failed!

A ham practices their trade at every available opportunity.
They turn on their radios at least once a day, just to see if the bands are open and who is talking.
A real ham would join the ARRL or would at least subscribe to publications so they could keep abreast of what is happening in the radio world.
A ham would have antennas on the outside of their homes and vehicles and they would have skills other than just being able to plug things into the wall.

At least on the television program ALF, the guy that had the ham radio equipment knew how to use it and ALF also knew how to use it and did use it to communicate with others.

As long as no one promotes amateur radio, as long as main stream America doesn't accept what we do as being a public service, as long as the people on the radio acts like dick heads and talks like cb'rs and acts like cb'rs and as long as the ARRL and FCC does nothing about these cb'rs, this is all that it is going to be!