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The evolution of the family welfare benefits system since 1950 is re-examined through the role played by its financing, and in particular the importance of dynamic receipts allocated to an independent budget generating accounting surpluses. Three large periods may be distinguished by the way in which surpluses in the family branch of the social security system have been used or averted. Up until the middle of the 1970s, the resulting margins were used above all to reduce rates of contributions allocated to the family branch, to the benefit of other social security programmes. Thereafter, and up to 2014, that branch was guaranteed resources keeping pace, remarkably, with growth, including after the substitution of part of the contributions with tax receipts from the early 1990s. The period beginning in 2014 marks a change with, for the first time in four decades, a dramatic decoupling of receipts from GDP and, concomitantly, an unprecedented drop in spending.