I find this affirmation, while perfectly legit and natural, a really sad indicator of today's state of IT: normally I expect a programmer to be payed because of it knowledge and time, used to solve problems. In that sense languages, libraries etc are simple tools so a metric like "$tool make me earn $amount of money" is a nonsense, something like a carpenter saying "drill make me more money than saw"...

Of course, some tools maybe more effective than others, but I still find sad measure in money terms any of them...