I think that the right answer would be that you don't need a radio - you first need to find yourself a real ham - to Elmer you.
Most hams thinks economy - buy junk, save a couple of dollars now, pay a couple of dollars more later when it don't work.
In the old days - you would hop in your vehicle with friends, drive to the local amateur radio store - HRO / DX Engineering etc and go there to listen to the different rigs so you could make a opinion on which one sounds the best and which one works the best and which one would most suit your needs.
When you spend more than $1500 on a brand new Kenwood or ICOM - I would hope you would find a rig that has some sort of built in DSP Filtering and an auto tuner.
Forget About buying a Jesus radio - Yaaesu or any of the Chinese crap or anything more than 1 year old or used!
What ever POS you buy, you are going to be forced to use it the rest of your life, or at least until it breaks and you will be forced to make excuses for why it is a POS and why you don't operate more - because the audio is so crappy - you don't even like turning it on and you can't stand to listen to it.
My recommendations would be A Kenwood TS 590 - there is lot's of them out there and you can buy a brand new one for a reasonable amount of money.
Then you don't need to buy all the garbage you would need to interface the cheap crappy radios most of the other people has recommended for you..
Old mobiles and crappy low power radios - are the ones you need to stay away from - there hold no value to no one except the idiot that bought it and would like to get their money back out of it - because they don't know how to operaTE qrp and they don't understand antennas.
There is what you need to concern yourself with - buying a good first antenna.