For the record, in modern spoken Hebrew, 1,000,000,000 is “milliard”, while 1,000,000,000 is “trillion”, although I’ve had diehard pedants (by which I mean my wife) occasionally correct the latter to “billion”.
(She’s left-wing, while I’m more of a centrist).
You all right? Have a lie down. mate. Preferably in a darkened room.
It’s one of several old Chinese systems using the same characters, somewhat analogous to Western ‘short scale’, ‘long scale’. The one where each numeral starting at 10,000 is 10,000 times times the previous one is predominant in China, Korea and Japan although an alternate system where each step is a factor of 10 is used in certain references (‘megabyte’ in Chinese uses 兆 as 10^6 whereas in the general step-by-four system it’s 10^12). Unlike eg. the Western calendar system, 10^3 steps for big numbers have never got much foothold in those countries.
As has been mentioned, saying a billion is a 100 million is just ignorant. And the ‘long scale’ numbers were only common in British English and now basically obsolete. However ‘milliard’ does persist slightly in some financial markets where a billion is called a ‘yard’.
I suspect a typo here.
Yeah, the second was supposed to be 1,000,000,000,000.
What does anyone’s political position have to do with their mathematical literacy?
They are always complaining about how little is spent on all manner of things by government. Plus I was giving a little background for those who don’t know them. And they tend to be the sorts who happily admit they can’t do numbers.
Sure, if you ignore that part of the surface of the globe known in colloquial language as “the rest of the world”. 
That’s a lot of passive language. Don’t you have confidence in your ideas?
Well, I’ve never heard of any of these people other than Mrs. Hamilton, the British counterpart of Mrs. Clinton in all their corrupt glory, and I’m British. So I suppose I learned they existed.
I didn’t want to learn that, though.
Not to nit pick but i think you have spelled it wrong
AlooMenEeum.
There ya go
Reported.
Nitpick: 10[sup]18[/sup] is 1 quintillion in US-speak.
Do you take pride in not knowing things?
Thai has single-syllable words for each of 10, 100, 1000, and 10,000 and 100,000 and 1,000,000. And therefore two-syllable compound words for 10 million, 100 million, billion, 10 billion, 100 billion, trillion. This is very convenient.
I’ve noticed that country folk and businessmen have a different way of saying numbers like 280,000. The businessman will say (the equivalent of) “twenty-eight ten-thousand;” farmers say “two hundred-thousand eight.”
Before we can answer that we are trying to determine if we know what a billion is! 
Most of modern culture is alien to me — to waste one’s very short number of hours in a lifetime looking at and learning about individual gibbering clowns of politicians or entertainers one is not attracted to or learning about any activity that personally bores one, will not warm one in the grave.
That is not a question of morals, simply of time-economics.
I am aware of the Greek definition, non-pejorative, of uninterest in politics as idiotic, yet there were far fewer aspects to politics in his day. A modern-day graduate of Georgetown has to study many more disciplines and balances, and perhaps be much more intelligent, than the most brilliant politician in Ancient Greece.
That could possibly be Pericles. Never warmed up to him myself: very like Kennedy.
So how many is a Brazillion?