Machinists are better looking, more productive, broadly knowledgable, and have greater understanding of all things than the doofuses in white aprons. The machinists get the girls (the young single ones - the older ones make fabulous husbands being loyal and affectionate, good with children, and provident).
Toolmakers have a lower reproductive rate (who would marry one?), stand looking at benches a lot, and never get their hands dirty. Tool makers complain because the can't read the drawing, hate to work with (enter most any material here) and have to ask machinist to perform calculations for them.
Why they get premium pay, I don't know. Maybe it's to make up for the burden of the "toolmaker" title.
Yeah, there's a bit of tension between machinists and toolmakersand we all have fun with it. Both are great trades and a worker in either will find a whole vocation to occupy his talents all his career. Toolmakers do carry a bit more responsibility and work more from general direction than detailed drawings.
I've done a good deal of toolmaking in my day but I'd never present myself as one at a job interview. No toolmakier could hope to get the productivity out of machine tools or be as efficient at fitting and alignment as a good all around machinist.
As for a precise distinction I'd go as far as: tool makers make tools, jigs, and fixtures for manufacturing and production and a machinist focuses on production machine work and the assembly and fitting of machined parts into working mechanisms.
Try to make too great a distinction and you inevitable run into an extensive overlap.
It's sufficient to say that a toolmaker can make one simple part to 40 millionths of an inch in the time it takes a machinist to make 100 complex parts to 0.0005".
Take away the derisive tone of the above gibe and it becomes a statement of orientation. The toolmaker is a specialist and the machinist a production worker.
I'd hate them overpaid bastards in white aprons - if I didn't need them so much.