Or you could apply proper, professional project management methods to make sure the last 20% doesn't take half the time of the entire project.
No method guarantees project success, as can be seen from plenty of failed high-profile projects. But basic project management and estimation methods applied not only at project start, will definitely get you out of the very basic problem of "90% complete, forever".
There is no "past performance" for most projects, because they are different enough to prohibit extrapolations.
The above holds for large IT projects and software construction of course.
For a small shop making indie games or for a web shop churning websites what you say is perfectly possible.
As a project gets underway, you get the best possible indicator, namely past performance for the specific project. If you do regular re-estimation, progress monitoring and risk management (and you should, if you are a professional PM), you might not know if you are 52 or 53% done, but you will definitely know if you are ~80% done or ~50% done.
If you want sources, read McConnell's "Software estimation" and references, or if you are in a hurry, take the bite-sized blog post about "Yesterdays weather" from Fowler: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/YesterdaysWeather.html which is based on the same experience and literature.
As for projects going over initial budgets, that's a different problem from progress monitoring, though they often go hand in hand.
But as the author suggests, just getting into it and working hard from the beginning won't make a difference. That will just ensure a project-long crunch which will be highly detrimental to team performance.